digital map

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman
Published 22 Sep 2016

Let’s begin with the opportunities. HD digital maps represent an emerging industry and a strategic battleground. In 2015, Nokia sold its digital mapping and navigation division to a German consortium of automakers that plans to harvest the data to improve their location-based services. The corporate titan that’s already leading the pack in the race to build highly accurate and up-to-date digital maps is, of course, Google. Google has invested decades of human labor and billions of dollars to build its treasure-trove of highly detailed and up-to-date digital maps. Some of the original data in Google’s maps was initially collected and organized by government projects developed for the U.S. census and to depict the topographic details of the fifty United States.1 Since then, the maps have been constantly updated.

…

Mark Harris “The Unknown Start-up That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car,” IEEE Spectrum Online, November 19, 2014, http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car 9 Anatomy of a Driverless Car Driverless cars “see” and “hear” by taking in real-time data that flows in from several different types of on-board sensors. Cars recognize their current location using a GPS device and a high-definition stored digital map. Let’s take an in-depth look at the suite of hardware devices that provide data to the car’s operating system. High-definition digital maps Humans learn their way around a new neighborhood by recognizing distinctive landmarks. Driverless cars find their way around with a GPS, with visual sensors, and by following a high-definition (HD) digital map, a detailed and precise model of a region’s most important surface features. Driverless cars use machine-learning software to deal with real-time traffic situations, and rich, detailed, and constantly updated high-definition digital maps to handle longer term navigation.

…

Driverless cars use machine-learning software to deal with real-time traffic situations, and rich, detailed, and constantly updated high-definition digital maps to handle longer term navigation. A driverless car knows its ballpark location by looking up its GPS coordinates on a high-definition digital map. GPS coordinates, however, tend to be a few feet off the mark, making them insufficient for autonomous driving. Driverless-car designers have come up with different techniques to compensate for the inability of GPS data to pinpoint the car’s exact location. The operating system of early driverless cars placed more weight on stored data from digital maps and less on real-time GPS and sensed data. As the performance of machine-learning software and visual sensors—particularly digital cameras—improves, it’s increasingly common for a car’s operating system to calculate its current location by relying on visual cues in the flow of real-time sensor data that depicts the nearby environment.

Ruby by example: concepts and code
by Kevin C. Baird
Published 1 Jun 2007

 Ranges irb(main):001:0> digit_range = 0..9 => 0..9 irb(main):002:0> digit_range.class => Range irb(main):003:0> digits = digit_range.to_a => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] irb(main):004:0> digits.map { |num| num + 1 } => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] irb(main):005:0> digits.map { |num| num + 10 } => [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19] irb(main):006:0> digits.map { |num| num * 2 } => [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18] irb(main):007:0> digits.map { |num| num ** 2 } => [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81] irb(main):008:0> digits => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] irb(main):009:0> digits.map! { |num| num ** 2 } => [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81] irb(main):010:0> digits => [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81] As you can see, map is very convenient for any sort of transformation of a list of items that can be expressed with a simple description, such as double all of these things on line six, or square all of these things on line seven.

…

When we use the expression &:some_name, what we mean is the expression returned by the to_proc method of the Symbol named some_name. 4 Those terms are made explicit at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/license.txt M ore C om pl ex U ti li ti es an d T ric ks , P ar t II 203 The Results Let’s see it in action in irb. irb -r symbol.rb irb(main):001:0> digits = (0..9).to_a => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] irb(main):002:0> digits.inject(&:+) => 45 irb(main):003:0> digits.map(&:inspect) => ["0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9"] irb(main):004:0> require 'to_lang' => true irb(main):005:0> digits.map(&:to_en) => ["", "one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine"] Hacking the Script This script is already a very elegant hack. Note that you need to use Proc.new rather than lambda, because you want it to be able to handle a variable number of args.

…

We can just reverse our Array, right? irb(main):006:0> reversed_digits.reverse => ["681", "282"] This won’t work. It puts the groups in the right order, but the digits within each group are still reversed. We can use the map method to reverse each member of the Array instead. irb(main):007:0> reversed_digits.map { |unit| unit.reverse } => ["282", "186"] N um be r U t il it ie s 79 Oops. Now the digits within each set of three numbers are in the right order, but the groups are in the wrong order. We could define yet another variable like reversed_digits in a two-step operation, but why not take advantage of Ruby’s ability to chain methods?

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

Tweeting on street violence certainly does not have the widespread impact of a punchy piece of investigative journalism from a professional journalist. But the trail of tweets, pictures on Flickr, personal blog posts, and other digital artifacts creates an archive about events that is more public, distributed, and openly contested. Crowd sourcing the production of digital maps of shootings, health needs, or criminal activity is a way of both warning the community and processing the crisis for oneself. The internet is valuable because it provides the medium for altruism. Even a community in crisis—especially that kind of community—has altruists, and social media let those people find one another and communicate by example.

…

Much of the land was supposed to be collectively managed by the poor campesinos and indigenas of the region or to be under the protection of the national park system. Yet satellites could see the changes from orbit, and his lab had computed the rates of change. The Mexican army had come for the digital maps, but the sergeant in charge didn’t know what it meant for the data to be “in the computer.” He thought the ecologist was hiding something, so he ordered his men to destroy all the equipment. The Zapatistas had visited him only two weeks before. They knew the value of data, and they knew how to repurpose satellite coordinates on forest cover for political impact.

…

When the Romans set out to organize their expanding empire, they mapped the great lengths of roads and aqueducts that structured their social world. British cartographers provided merchants with maps of the best trading routes and equipped military officers with maps that identified the best places for fortifications. In recent years, we’ve started producing new kinds of digital maps that reveal new kinds of power. What new maps do we need to understand the new world order? The usual map of the world reveals a patchwork of countries. Yet there is a surprising number of people and places that aren’t really connected to the countries they are supposed to be part of. We are used to political maps that mislead us about how governments are really able to govern.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray
Published 31 Mar 2014

With cheap GPS units and Internet-based mapping services, just about anyone can become a part-time cartographer, making corrections and additions to current maps or generating entirely new ones. In Chapter 8 we will see how companies like MapQuest and Google brought cheap digital maps to the masses and then gave us the tools to modify and improve them to our heart’s content. And we’ll see how do-it-yourself mapmaking has become a vital tool for human rights activists and disaster relief workers. With our digital maps and GPS-enabled phones, we can find anyplace with ease, but others can also find us. In the final two chapters, we will consider the implications of this new locational transparency.

…

For Google Maps, that meant maintaining a fleet of GPS-equipped cars festooned with cameras and laser range finders. As they drove streets throughout the United States and the world, these cars generated rich 3-D imagery of the places they mapped. Google began using the images to create a new kind of digital map that gave users a street-level view of a place. A user could take a virtual stroll down a street, seeing exactly what he would see if he had gone in person. From its launch in May 2007, the new Street View service was popular with deskbound explorers, but attacked by privacy advocates. The Street View mapping vehicles captured images of individuals, some of whom did not care to have their activities put on global display.

…

Between DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, SPOT Image, and hundreds of aerial photography companies, the entire planet has been imaged with remarkable fidelity. These images, translated into highly accurate maps, have shown us the world at a level of detail never before possible. But lately we have learned that cartography is too important to be left entirely to cartographers. Today’s Internet-hosted digital maps have given rise to a new generation of amateur mapmakers with two big advantages over the professionals—there are thousands of them, and they are everywhere. 8 A Map of One’s Own UNTIL RECENTLY, THE BEST-KNOWN SATELLITE IMAGES OF NORTH Korea showed next to nothing. They were nighttime images, shot by weather satellites or commercial space cameras for hire and readily available online.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman
Published 19 Oct 2020

But she warns that we need to be “careful of our mirrors.” Looking in the wrong ones can hurt us; she writes of feeling like a failure as a writer after comparing herself to others, of how looking “for an image in someone else’s mirror” prevents her from seeing herself clearly. It’s not just comparison, either. The digital maps we create of our own lives can contain distortions we’re not aware of. In The Memory Illusion, psychologist and science writer Julia Shaw argues that you “aren’t as attractive as you think.” Which, first of all, rude. She argues there are two reasons for this: “basic memory processes and the way we use technology.”

…

More of us are becoming aware of how people from privileged backgrounds often move into digital landscapes created by the disenfranchised and colonize them, consciously or otherwise, redrawing the map and renaming things in their own image. So often we (this absolutely includes me) do it without realizing, so ingrained are some of the practices. We borrow pieces of other people’s digital maps without even knowing where those pieces came from. But the fact that this often happens without intention doesn’t make it okay. It makes it all the more pernicious. Like mapmakers and the people who have commissioned their work, social media creators and users often act in ways that feel colonial.

…

And if connecting is essential to what makes us human—not just having access to the same information but also being together, being able to interact with and learn from one another—then the internet, while far from perfect, can certainly feel like a marked improvement over the less expansive networks of the past. Ultimately, just as mapmaking has shaped the world, the digital maps we create—of ourselves and also of the networks we build between ourselves and others—will shape the future. Once upon a time the various societies of the world were much more disconnected, but gradually, thanks in part to maps—­cartographic and digital—we have grown to see ourselves as part of something bigger. *** As a child, I was mesmerized by different maps of the same place.

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
by Ken Jennings
Published 19 Sep 2011

The first six days, it was nip and tuck.” When I met McClendon at the National Geographic Bee, he invited me to stop by his Mountain View, California, offices for “the nickel tour” if I was ever in the neighborhood. He was probably just being polite and had no way of knowing the level of my obsession with digital maps; I can spend days happily adrift over the pixelized Siberian taiga or gleefully rotating the 3-D buildings of the Manhattan skyline. During the first couple of months of Google Earth’s release, there were probably plenty of weekends when I spent more time on Google Earth than I did on our Earth.

…

If everything you do is geotagged, then everyone always knows where you are—which is awesome if you’re hoping to meet some friends after work for a drink but maybe not so awesome if potential burglars are casing your neighborhood to find out who’s not home, or if you’re dealing with an abusive ex or a child predator or even some stranger who got mad about something you posted online. We’re an Orwellian dystopia in the making, says Dobson, except that no shadowy government will be providing the surveillance. Instead, we’re opting to do it to ourselves. With Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto in mind, I ask Paul Rademacher if he worries about the new digital map technology—call it Maps 2.0—turning evil. He tells me that Michael Jones, Google Earth’s chief technologist, often points out that all new technologies seem scary, but months later you find yourself wondering what you ever did without them. “He once gave the example of how cell phones now are cameras and how that seemed scary and invasive.

…

It goes without saying, of course, that Maps 2.0 has saved lives as well, from hikers stranded on mountainsides to Hurricane Katrina victims. In January 2010, a magnitude-seven earthquake flattened Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Rescue workers didn’t know where to start; even the ones with GPS receivers quickly discovered that there were no good digital maps of Haiti. Google, to its credit, gave the United Nations full access to the usually proprietary data in its collaborative Map Maker tool, but the real hero of the hour was the OpenStreetMap project, an open-source alternative to Map Maker. OpenStreetMap is essentially the Wikipedia of maps: anyone can use it, anyone can change it in real time, and its data is free and uncopyrighted in perpetuity.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

Tech start-ups no longer need much initial funding: you can build and market test a sophisticated tool quickly and cheaply. Simultaneously, and thanks to some of the same trends, the cost of failure associated with interconnection has gone way up. It has now become easy and cheap to make the types of interconnected systems that incur huge costs when something goes wrong. When digital maps are connected to software that provides directions, small errors can be disastrous (for example, Apple Maps mislabeled a supermarket as a hospital when it was first unveiled). In an age when we can conceive of synthetically generating microbes by sending information over the Internet, the risk of some sort of biological disaster grows much higher.

…

We have systems in the world of finance that require an understanding of physics; there are economists involved in the development of computer systems. The design of driverless cars is a good example, requiring collaboration among those with expertise in software, lasers, automotive engineering, digital mapping, and more. In other words, even as specialization aids us in making advances, we are ever more dependent on systems that draw from many different areas, and require an understanding of each of these. Yet a single person can no longer possess all the necessary knowledge. To any one person, these systems as wholes are truly incomprehensible.

…

abstraction, 163 biological thinking’s avoidance of, 115–16 in complexity science, 133, 135 in physics thinking, 115–16, 121–22, 128 specialization and, 24, 26–27 technological complexity and, 23–28, 81, 121–22 accretion, 65 in complex systems, 36–43, 51, 62, 65, 191 in genomes, 156 in infrastructure, 42, 100–101 legacy systems and, 39–42 in legal system, 40–41, 46 in software, 37–38, 41–42, 44 in technological complexity, 130–31 unexpected behavior and, 38 aesthetics: biological thinking and, 119 and physics thinking, 113, 114 aggregation, diffusion-limited, 134–35 algorithm aversion, 5 Amazon, 5 American Philosophical Society, 90 Anaximander of Miletus, 139 Apple, 161, 163 Apple II computer, 77 applied mathematics, 143 arche, 140 Ariane 5 rocket, 1996 explosion of, 11–12 Aristotle, 151 Ascher, Kate, 100 Asimov, Isaac, 124 atomic nucleus, discovery of, 124, 141 Audubon, John James, 109 autocorrect, 5, 16 automobiles: self-driving, 91, 231–32 software in, 10–11, 13, 45, 65, 100, 174 see also Toyota automobiles Autonomous Technology (Winner), 22 Average Is Over (Cowen), 84 awe, as response to technological complexity, 6, 7, 154–55, 156, 165, 174 bacteria, 124–25 Balkin, Jack, 60–61 Ball, Philip, 12, 87–88, 136, 140 Barr, Michael, 10 Barrow, Isaac, 89 BASIC, 44–45 Bayonne Bridge, 46 Beacock, Ian, 12–13 Benner, Steven, 119 “Big Ball of Mud” (Foote and Yoder), 201 binary searches, 104–5 biological systems, 7 accretion in, 130–31 complexity of, 116–20, 122 digital technology and, 49 kluges in, 119 legacy code in, 118, 119–20 modules in, 63 tinkering in, 118 unexpected behavior in, 109–10, 123–24 biological thinking, 222 abstraction avoided in, 115–16 aesthetics and, 119 as comfortable with diversity and complexity, 113–14, 115 concept of miscellaneous in, 108–9, 140–41, 143 as detail oriented, 121, 122, 128 generalization in, 131–32 humility and, 155 physics thinking vs., 114–16, 137–38, 142–43, 222 technological complexity and, 116–49, 158, 174 Blum, Andrew, 101–2 Boeing 777, 99 Bogost, Ian, 154 Bookout, Jean, 10 Boorstin, Daniel, 89 Borges, Jorge Luis, 76–77, 131 Boston, Mass., 101, 102 branch points, 80–81 Brand, Stewart, 39–40, 126, 198–99 Brookline, Mass., 101 Brooks, David, 155 Brooks, Frederick P., Jr., 38, 59, 93 bugs, in software, see software bugs bureaucracies, growth of, 41 cabinets of curiosities (wunderkammers), 87–88, 140 calendar application, programming of, 51–53 Cambridge, Mass., 101 cancer, 126 Carew, Diana, 46 catastrophes, interactions in, 126 Challenger disaster, 9, 11, 12, 192 Chandra, Vikram, 77 Chaos Monkey, 107, 126 Chekhov, Anton, 129 Chekhov’s Gun, 129 chess, 84 Chiang, Ted, 230 clickstream, 141–42 Clock of the Long Now, The (Brand), 39–40 clouds, 147 Code of Federal Regulations, 41 cognitive processing: of language, 73–74 limitations on, 75–76, 210 nonlinear systems and, 78–79 outliers in, 76–77 working memory and, 74 see also comprehension, human collaboration, specialization and, 91–92 Commodore VIC-20 computer, 160–61 complexity, complex systems: acceptance of, see biological thinking accretion in, 36–43, 51, 62, 65, 191 aesthetics of, 148–49, 156–57 biological systems and, 116–17, 122 buoys as examples of, 14–15, 17 complication vs., 13–15 connectivity in, 14–15 debugging of, 103–4 edge cases in, 53–62, 65, 201, 205 feedback and, 79, 141–45 Gall on, 157–58, 227 hierarchies in, 27, 50–51 human interaction with, 163 infrastructure and, 100–101 inherent vs. accidental, 189 interaction in, 36, 43–51, 62, 65, 146 interconnectivity of, see interconnectivity interpreters of, 166–67, 229 kluges as inevitable in, 34–36, 62–66, 127 in legal systems, 85 and limits of human comprehension, 1–7, 13, 16–17, 66, 92–93 “losing the bubble” and, 70–71, 85 meaning of terms, 13–20 in natural world, 107–10 scientific models as means of understanding, 165–67 specialization and, 85–93 unexpected behavior in, 27, 93, 96–97, 98–99, 192 see also diversity; technological complexity complexity science, 132–38, 160 complication, complexity vs., 13–15 comprehension, human: educability of, 17–18 mystery and, 173–74 overoptimistic view of, 12–13, 152–53, 156 wonder and, 172 see also cognitive processing comprehension, human, limits of, 67, 212 complex systems and, 1–7, 13, 16–17, 66, 92–93 humility as response to, 155–56 interconnectivity and, 78–79 kluges and, 42 legal system and, 22 limitative theorems and, 175 “losing the bubble” in, 70–71, 85 Maimonides on, 152 stock market systems and, 26–27 technological complexity and, 18–29, 69–70, 80–81, 153–54, 169–70, 175–76 unexpected behavior and, 18–22, 96–97, 98 “Computational Biology” (Doyle), 222 computational linguistics, 54–57 computers, computing: complexity of, 3 evolutionary, 82–84, 213 impact on technology of, 3 see also programmers, programming; software concealed electronic complexity, 164 Congress, U.S., 34 Constitution, U.S., 33–34 construction, cost of, 48–50 Cope, David, 168–69, 229–30 corpus, in linguistics, 55–56 counting: cognitive limits on, 75 human vs. computer, 69–70, 97, 209 Cowen, Tyler, 84 Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), 128–29 “Crystalline Structure of Legal Thought, The” (Balkin), 60–61 Curiosity (Ball), 87–88 Dabbler badge, 144–45 dark code, 21–22 Darwin, Charles, 115, 221, 227 Daston, Lorraine, 140–41 data scientists, 143 datasets, massive, 81–82, 104–5, 143 debugging, 103–4 Deep Blue, 84 diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA), 134–35 digital mapping systems, 5, 49, 51 Dijkstra, Edsger, 3, 50–51, 155 “Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature, Both in Men and Brutes” (Fairfax), 111–12 diversity, 113–14, 115 see also complexity, complex systems DNA, see genomes Doyle, John, 222 Dreyfus, Hubert, 173 dwarfism, 120 Dyson, Freeman, on unity vs. diversity, 114 Dyson, George, 110 Economist, 41 edge cases, 53–62, 65, 116, 128, 141, 201, 205, 207 unexpected behavior and, 99–100 see also outliers Einstein, Albert, 114 Eisen, Michael, 61 email, evolution of, 32–33 emergence, in complex systems, 27 encryption software, bugs in, 97–98 Enlightenment, 23 Entanglement, Age of, 23–29, 71, 92, 96, 97, 165, 173, 175, 176 symptoms of, 100–102 Environmental Protection Agency, 41 evolution: aesthetics and, 119 of biological systems, 117–20, 122 of genomes, 118, 156 of technological complexity, 127, 137–38 evolutionary computation, 82–84, 213 exceptions, see edge cases; outliers Facebook, 98, 189 failure, cost of, 48–50 Fairfax, Nathanael, 111–12, 113, 140 fear, as response to technological complexity, 5, 7, 154–55, 156, 165 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Y2K bug and, 37 feedback, 14–15, 79, 135 Felsenstein, Lee, 21 Fermi, Enrico, 109 Feynman, Richard, 9, 11 field biologists, 122 for complex technologies, 123, 126, 127, 132 financial sector: interaction in, 126 interconnectivity of, 62, 64 see also stock market systems Firthian linguistics, 206 Flash Crash (2010), 25 Fleming, Alexander, 124 Flood, Mark, 61, 85 Foote, Brian, 201 Fortran, 39 fractals, 60, 61, 136 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, 89 fruit flies, 109–10 “Funes the Memorious” (Borges), 76–77, 131 Galaga, bug in, 95–96, 97, 216–17 Gall, John, 157–58, 167, 227 game theory, 210 garden path sentences, 74–75 generalists, 93 combination of physics and biological thinking in, 142–43, 146 education of, 144, 145 explosion of knowledge and, 142–49 specialists and, 146 as T-shaped individuals, 143–44, 146 see also Renaissance man generalization, in biological thinking, 131–32 genomes, 109, 128 accretion in, 156 evolution of, 118, 156 legacy code (junk) in, 118, 119–20, 222 mutations in, 120 RNAi and, 123–24 Gibson, William, 176 Gingold, Chaim, 162–63 Girl Scouts, 144–45 glitches, see unexpected behavior Gmail, crash of, 103 Gödel, Kurt, 175 “good enough,” 27, 42, 118, 119 Goodenough, Oliver, 61, 85 Google, 32, 59, 98, 104–5 data centers of, 81–82, 103, 189 Google Docs, 32 Google Maps, 205 Google Translate, 57 GOTO command, 44–45, 81 grammar, 54, 57–58 gravitation, Newton’s law of, 113 greeblies, 130–31 Greek philosophy, 138–40, 151 Gresham College, 89 Guide of the Perplexed, The (Maimonides), 151 Haldane, J.

Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds
by Rusty Bradley and Kevin Maurer
Published 27 Jun 2011

Most conventional combat units had the newest Humvee models with an onboard tracking system called the Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below, or FBCB2. The system let commanders navigate and see all the other units on the battlefield through a satellite uplink. Dubbed a “force tracker,” it showed the positions of friendly units and trucks on a digital map. The operator could click on the icons and not only tell their location but the type of unit as well. Brian, Ron, and I had to MacGyver one out of my laptop, a GPS, and some scrap metal. Brian and Ron figured out a way to hook the GPS to the computer mapping system and put an antenna in the back so we could track our position.

…

As Hodge’s team passed Regay, we switched the formation from a broad V to a straight line or “Ranger file” of trucks to maneuver through the never-ending labyrinth of broken buildings, irrigation ditches, marijuana, cornfields, and grape vineyards. Centuries-old ashpsh khana, or grape-drying huts, which stood three or four stories tall, dotted the fields, perfect redoubts for snipers. I kept one eye on the huts and the other on the dust-covered display of the digital map. We were close to the point of no return, an imaginary decision point on that map. My nerves spiked as we raced down the dirt track toward the first compound. There was too much vegetation and too much cover. It was harvesttime, a bad time to start any operation. The enemy could hide anywhere.

…

Our truck jolted backward, accompanied by an avalanche of brass shell casings cascading from the roof and hood. The other trucks on my team followed suit, and we stayed in one another’s tire tracks to avoid land mines and IEDs. As we blew back out through the entranceway, the suffocating sensation of being in the kill zone evaporated. I watched the collage of colors on the digital map fade flat as we moved several kilometers into the desert. Round one went to the Taliban. Chapter 14 SEVEN TWO-THOUSAND- POUNDERS War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want. —GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN Jared’s truck skidded to a halt near mine, enveloped in a thick, choking dust cloud.

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

Citizen Beyond quantification 217 science is a scientific practice where non-professional researchers are involved in the process of conducting research (Silvertown 2009), and it is a type of science which can insert agency and control into the smart city. It is possible to imagine groups coming together in an inclusive and open way, discussing urban issues they would like to address and using existing sources of data combined with their own reporting and analysis to address them. The emergence of community/crowd/user-generated digital maps (Haklay et al. 2008) provide some evidence for activities that, at their worst, fall into the trap of a device paradigm and at their best demonstrate the potential of new focal practices that are facilitated by technology. Projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) (Haklay and Weber 2008) exhibit complex relationships between the contributor to the mapping product and the user of the map in terms of their understanding of data, as well as making decisions about what will be captured and how.

…

For the OSM mapper, who is commonly interested in her local area and walks through it to record specific objects, the process of mapping is an example of a novel way to engage with the world (Budhathoki and Haythornthwaite 2013). In a project such as OSM, in which mappers state that their affiliation to the project is linked to the project’s goal, which is the production of a freely available accurate digital map of the world (Budhathoki 2010), this is especially true, although there is some evidence that people who update Google Map Maker are also doing so because they identify an error in the map in their local area and are concerned with the way it is represented to the world. In both these cases, the process is about creating an empirical representation of reality in a digital format, of identifying a road or amenity in reality and creating a representation of it using the location information from a GPS receiver or identifying objects on detailed satellite images and describing them.

…

Acknowledgement A shorter version of this chapter appears in Urban Pamphleteer No. 1 by UCL Urban Lab (2013), edited by Ben Campkin and Rebecca Ross. Some material also appears on my blog (povesham.wordpress.com). I would like to thank Chris Perkins and Sybille Lammes for the 2013 workshop on ‘Thinking and doing digital mapping’ where some of the ideas for this chapter were discussed. The research was supported by EPSRC ‘Extreme’ Citizen Science grant (EP/I025278/1) and FP7 EveryAware project. Beyond quantification 223 References Becker, M., Caminiti, S., Fiorella, D., Francis, L., Gravino, P., Haklay, M., Hotho, A., Loreto, V., Mueller, J., Ricchiuti, F., Servedio, V.D., Sîrbu, A. and Tria, F. (2013) ‘Awareness and learning in participatory noise sensing’, PLoS One 8(12).

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

the condensed idea Don’t panic, we’re inventive timeline 1973 First oil crisis 2020 Launch of North African solar grid 2025 Oil, coal and gas still responsible for 70 percent of energy supply 2030 Global energy demand up by 50 percent over 2008 levels 2045 Clean energy islands built off the coast of China 2050 First commercial thorium reactor 08 Precision agriculture Global population growth (more precisely, global income growth) will challenge the ability of agriculture to deliver maximum productivity in the future, especially if climate change negatively affects agricultural yields. Until quite recently farmers used experience mixed with trial and error to produce crops, but things are changing down on the farm. “Precision agriculture” is a term used to describe the use of hyperspecific GPS (global positioning systems) and digital mapping to control precisely the application of seeds, pesticides and water to crops and, on occasion, to manage livestock. For example, precise satellite imagery of fields enables farmers to vary the delivery of chemicals down to areas as small as 2.5cm (1in)—or a single plant. This means minimum waste and pesticide residue runoff into adjacent habitats, and maximum profitability.

…

Jimmy Fallon, actor and comedian “Home, James” The big question, though, is when are we finally going to get behind the wheel of a driverless vehicle? Well you already can. Many airports already feature driverless trains. Indeed, much of the technology needed for driverless cars already exists. Radar cruise control, motion sensors, lane-change warnings, electronic stability control, and digital mapping are all here. The main obstacle is regulation, liability laws and our own feelings about letting go of the steering wheel. And if this makes you feel unsafe, how about pilotless commercial airliners? Again, the technology exists, but our historically conditioned brains can’t quite cope with the idea yet.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann , Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler
Published 25 Mar 2018

Depending on constantly changing traffic situations (accidents, traffic jams during rush hours), the vehicle’s processing unit should constantly check the selected route and take alternative routes into consideration. What it needs to do this is a precise map to address the need for real-world reference data on live roads and to provide real-time information about the traffic situation on those roads. Model 101 MAPPING AND LOCALISING Digital maps play a key role for autonomous driving because they create the conditions for all location-based services. In addition, for nearly all V-to-X applications, identification of a vehicle’s position in the traffic is required, which is only possible with precise map material. For example, it is essential for emergency services to know whether a broken-down vehicle is in the overtaking lane or on the hard shoulder.

…

A minimum of 10 vehicles that supply the same information is deemed to be a swarm, and therefore the information is reliable. Each vehicle connected with HERE constantly transmits its information to the map service. HERE evaluates the Autonomous Driving 138 information and enters it into the digital map. The new information is then immediately available to all vehicles with the required authorisation. CONNECTED MOBILITY Connected vehicles are an element of the mobility services offered by service providers like Moovel [2]. The use of various modes of transportation such as trains, buses and (in the future) autonomous vehicles is organised by a platform in line with customers’ preferences.

…

This page intentionally left blank INDEX A9 autobahn in Germany, 134, 135, 407 ACCEL, 324 Accelerating, 8, 22, 27, 59, 78, 91, 122, 295, 296 Access Economy, 344 Acoustic signals, 108 Ad-hoc mobility solutions, 354 Ad-hoc networks, 133 Adaptive cruise control, 4, 51, 72 74, 78, 86, 96, 113, 116, 289, 297, 333 Aerospace industry, 153 Agenda for auto industry culture change, 396 increasing speed, 398 service-oriented business model, 397 398 V-to-home and V-to-business applications, 399 Agile operating models, 330 Agriculture, 154 productivity, 155 sector, 154 157 Air pollution, 27 AirBnB, 311 Airplane electronics, 144 Aisin, 9 Albert (head of design at Yahoo), 228 Alexandra (founder and owner of Powerful Minds), 228 Alibaba Alipay payment system, 372 Alternative fuels, autonomous vehicles enabling use of, 305 Altruistic mode (a-drive mode), 252 Amazon, 138, 141, 311 American Trucking Association, 68 Android operating system, 327 Anthropomorphise products, 290 Appel Logistics transports, 167 Apple, 9, 138, 327 CarPlay, 285 Apple Mac OS, 247 Apple-type model, 323 Application layer, 119 software, 118 Artificial intelligence, 115, 255, 291, 332 333 Artificial neuronal networks, 114 115 Asia projects, 371 374 Assembly Row, 386 Assessment of Safety Standards for Automotive Electronic Control Systems, 144 Assistance systems, 71 77 Audi, 5, 130, 134, 137, 179, 211, 301, 318, 322, 398 Driverless Race Car, 5 piloted driving, 286 piloted-parking technology, 386 387 Audi A7, 44, 198, 282 427 428 Audi A8 series-car, 79, 180 Audi AI traffic jam pilot, 79 Audi Fit Driver service, 318 319 Audi piloted driving lab, 227, 229 Audi Q7, 74 assistance systems in, 75 Audi RS7, 43, 44, 79 autonomous racing car, 179 driverless, 227 Audi TTS, 43 Audi Urban Future Initiative, 384 386, 406 Augmented reality, 279 vision and example, 279 280 Authorities and cities, 171 173 Auto ISAC, 146 Autolib, 317, 344 Autoliv, 285 Automakers’ bug-bounty programs, 146 Automated car, 233, 246, 264, 289, 384 Automated driving division of labour between driver and driving system, 48 examples, 51 53 image, 177 levels of, 47 51 scenarios for making use of travelling time, 52 strategies, 53 56 technology, 160 Automated vehicles, 9, 174, 246 Automated Vehicles Index, 367 368 Automatic car, 233, 244 Automatic pedestrian highlighting, 78 Automation ironies of, 76 responsibility with increasing, 235 Automobile, 3, 21 locations, 405 manufacturers, 311 Index Automotive design, 265 266 Automotive Ethernet, 126 Automotive incumbents operate, 330 Automotive industry, 332 335, 367, 379, 397 Automotive technology, 327 328 AutoNet2030 project, 369 Autonomous buses, 14, 81, 158, 159, 175, 302 Autonomous cars, 25, 126, 197, 205 206, 233, 244, 270 expected worldwide sales of, 85 savings effects from, 67 68 Autonomous driving, 3, 8, 39, 62, 94, 111, 116, 120, 121 123, 141, 160 162, 171, 173, 207 208, 217, 247, 252, 266, 332 333, 379 applications, 10 12, 160 aspects for, 93 Audi car, 5 autonomous Audi TTS on Way to Pikes Peak, 43 in combination with autonomous loading hubs, 166 driving to hub, 213 ecosystem, 18 20, 131 element, 243 facts about, 306 functions, 74 impression, 40 industry, 16 18 living room in Autonomous Mercedes F015, 44 milestones of automotive development, 4 NuTonomy, 6 projects, 41 45 real-world model of, 92 scenarios, 211 215 science fiction, 39 41 technology, 9 10, 92 Index time management, 215 218 vehicles, 12 16 See also Human driving Autonomous driving failure, 221 consequence, 221 222 decision conflict in autonomous car, 223 design options, 222 223 influencer, 223 224 Autonomous Mercedes F015, living room in, 44 Autonomous mobility, 12, 13, 16 17, 172, 405 establishment as industry of future, 404 405 resistance to, 171 172 Autonomous Robocars, 81 Autonomous sharp, 274 ‘Autonomous soft’ mode, 274 Autonomous trucks, 161 from Daimler, 163 savings effects from, 68 69 Autonomous vehicles, 26, 81, 99, 138, 155, 182, 221, 238, 249, 255, 353 354 enabling use of alternative fuels, 305 integration in cities, 406 promoting tests with, 407 uses, 153 AutoVots fleet, 350 Backup levels, 127 Baidu apps, 338, 372 Base layer, 119 Becker, Jan, 42 43 Behavioural law, 234 Being driven, 61, 63, 78, 342 343 Ben-Noon, Ofer, 142, 143, 145 Benz, Carl, 3, 4 Bertha (autonomous research vehicle), 42 Big data, 313, 332 333 BlaBlaCar, 359 429 Blackfriars bridge, lidar print cloud of, 104 Blind-spot detection, 78 Bloggers, 225 227 Blonde Salad, The, 226 Bluetooth, 130, 142, 154 BMW, 6, 130, 137, 174, 180, 316, 320, 322, 332 333, 372, 398 3-series cars, 338 BMW i3, 27 holoactive touch, 285 Boeing 777 development, 243 Boeing, 787, 261 Bosch, 9, 181 182 Bosch, Robert, 333 Bosch suppliers, 315 BosWash, metropolitan region, 384 Budii car, 272 273 Business models, 311, 353 355 automobile manufacturers, 311 content creators, 319 320 data creators, 320 322 examples, 312 hardware creators, 314 315 options, 312 314 passenger looks for new products, 321 passenger visits website, 321 service creators, 316 319 software creators, 315 316 strategic mix, 322 323 Business vehicle, 15 Business-to-consumer car sharing, 342 343 Cadillac, 180 California PATH Research Reports, 298 299 Cambot, 290 Cameras, 111, 126 CAN bus, 126, 143 Capsule, 33 Car and ride sharing, studies on, 348 430 Car dealers, repair shops and insurance companies, 173 174 Car manufacturers, 328, 396 397 business model, 312 Car-pooling efforts, 364 365 Car-sharing programs, 364 365 service, 383 Car-sharing, 206 Car2Go, 317, 345 Casey Neistat, 226 Castillo, Jose, 364 365 Celebrities and bloggers, 225 227 Central driver assistance control unit, 124 Central processing unit, 96, 124 zFAS, 125 Centre for Economic and Business Research in London, 189 Chevrolet, 40 app from General Motors, 316 Spark EV, 27 Cisco, 41 CityMobil project, 369, 406 CityMobil2, 14, 157 Cognitive distraction, 287 Coherent European framework, 246 Committee on Autonomous Road Transport for Singapore, 347 Communication, 198 200 investing in communication infrastructure, 403 404 technology, 261 Community, 341 detection algorithms, 389 Companion app, 316 Compelling force, 223 Competitiveness Iain Forbes, 368 369 projects in Asia, 371 374 Index projects in Europe and United States, 369 371 projects in Israel, 374 375 Computer operating systems, 247 Computer-driven driving, 108 Computerised information processing, 109 Congestion pricing, 296 Connected car, 129 ad-hoc networks, 133 connected driving, 137 138 connected mobility, 138 development of mobile communication networks, 130 digital ecosystems, 138 eCall, 136 137 online services, 136 137 permanent networks, 130 statement by telecommunications experts, 132 133 V-to-I communication, 134 135 V-to-V communication, 133 134 V-to-X communication, 135 136 See also Digitised car Connected mobility, 129, 138 Connected vehicles, 138 vulnerability of, 142 Connected-car services, 313 Connectivity of vehicles, 147 Consumer-electronics companies, 285 Container Terminal, 159 Content creators, 319 320 Continental (automotive suppliers), 9, 284, 315 Continuous feedback, 281 Convenience, 302 304, 306 Conventional breakthrough approach, 332 Index Conventional broadband applications, 132 Conventional car manufacturing, 10 Cook, Tim, 182 Cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS), 369 370 Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, 297 Cost(s), 187 192, 295 autonomous vehicles enabling use of alternative fuels, 305 fuel economy, 297 299 intelligent infrastructures, 299 301 land use, 304 operating costs, 301 302 relationship between road speed and road throughput, 296 vehicle throughput, 295 297 Croove app, 318 Culture, 330 change, 396 differences, 195 197 and organisational transformation, 395 Curtatone, Joseph, 387 Customers’ expectations attitudes, 204 207 incidents, 203 204 interview with 14 car dealers, 207 persuasion, 207 208 statements by two early adopters, 205 Cyber attacks, 141 Cyber hacking or failures in algorithms, 354 Cyber security, 141 146 Cyber-physical systems, 9 Daimler, 130 Data, 121 categories in vehicle, 147 creators, 320 322 431 from passengers, 94 95 privacy, 147 148 processing, 91 protection principles, 148 recorders, 239 Data-capturing technology, 103 Data-protection issues, 239 Database, 98 Decelerating, 91, 122 Decision-making mechanism, 369 Declaration of Amsterdam, 246 247 Deep learning, 115 Deep neural networks, 115 116 Deere, John, 154, 155 Deere, John, 154, 155, 263 Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), 41 Degree of autonomous driving, 53 Degree of autonomy, 262 Degree of market penetration, 84 Degree of not-invented-here arrogance, 332 Degree of vehicle’s automation, 233 234 Delhi municipal government, 21 22 Delphi, 9, 181 Delphi Automotive Systems, 6 Demise of Kodak, 111 Denner, Volkmar, 333 334 Denso, 9 Depreciation, 345 Destination control, 299, 300 Digital company development, 395 396 Digital economy, 225 Digital ecosystems, 138 Digital light-processing technology, 277, 279 Digital maps, 101 Digital products, 267 Digitised car algorithms, 113 117 432 backup levels, 127 car as digitised product, 111 112 data, 121 drive recorder, 125 126 drive-by-wire, 122 over-provisioning, 127 processor, 122 125 software, 117 121 See also Connected car Digitising and design of vehicle, 265 267 Dilemma situations, 61 Direct attacks, 141 Direct connectivity of vehicle, 130 Disruptions in mobility, 31, 34 arguments, 34 35 history, 32 33 OICA, 34 Disruptive technologies, 221, 223, 402 Document operation-relevant data, 263 Doll, Claus, 166 Dongles, 142 Drees, Joachim, 165 ‘Drive boost’ mode, 274 “Drive me” project, 370 Drive recorder, 125 126 ‘Drive relax’ mode, 274 Drive-by-wire, 122 DriveNow, 317, 345 Driver, 235 role, 235 238 Driver distraction, 55 causes and consequences, 278 Driver-assistance systems, 53, 71, 160, 174, 222, 298, 333, 353 Driverless cars, 3, 7, 27 28, 222, 233, 244 taxis, 302 vans, 406 vehicles, 168 Index Driverless Audi RS7, 227 229 Driverless Race Car of Audi, 5 Driving manoeuvres, 91 modes, 107 oneself, 342 343 Drunk driving, 303 Dvorak keyboard, 242 Dynamic patterns of movement in city of London, 390 eCall.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

His talk, brazenly titled “The 4 Commandments of Cities,” laid out his vision of how to run a city. For the climax, he turned to the screen and dialed up a videoconference with Carlos Roberto Osorio, his point man for urban affairs, back in Rio. For the next minute, Osorio flipped through a dizzying succession of live digital maps and debriefed the mayor on the day’s events (it was nearing midnight in Brazil as Paes spoke on the West Coast)—the GPS-tracked movements of the city’s garbage truck fleet, current precipitation picked up by the city’s brand-new Doppler radar, and Deep Thunder’s latest forecast (all clear). To cap off the show, Orsorio served up “a live transmission in downtown Rio for you, Mr.

…

But with the new chart living online in OpenStreetMap, Map Kibera is focused instead on powering new tools that change how the community is represented in the media, and how organizers lobby the government to address local problems. Voice of Kibera, for instance, is a citizen-reporting site built using another open-source tool called Ushahidi. The name means “testimony” in Swahili, and it was developed in 2008 to monitor election violence in Kenya. Voice of Kibera plots media stories about the community onto the open digital map, and allows residents to send in their own reports by SMS. Another Map Kibera effort recruits residents to monitor the progress of infrastructure projects. Government-funded slum upgrades, such as the installation of water pumps and latrines, are hot spots for graft in Kenya. Many of the projects are awarded to friends of parliament members, and the government doesn’t effectively monitor or audit contractors.

…

“Just in New York, it would allow 380,000 people to navigate completely independently through the city for the first time in human history.”28 It was a pretty remarkable gadget. Invented by Swedish firm Astando, e-Adept was financed in part by the city of Stockholm in its quest to become, according to the city’s website, “the most accessible capital in the world.”29 Using an exquisitely detailed digital map of the city’s terrain, the GPS-enabled headset talks to the user, calling out obstacles and safe paths. “It has had a huge impact—empowering those people to find jobs, releasing their relatives, and reducing demand on social services,” Haselmayer says. He claims that for just $500,000 in annual operating costs, the system is generating $20 million a year in direct economic benefits for Stockholm.

Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda
by Sean Naylor
Published 1 Mar 2005

As the AFO second-in-command continued chatting with Harrell and Jones, his RTO typed the grid that Razor 03 crew had just broadcast for their landing zone into a laptop computer, which instantly plotted it on a digital map of the Shahikot. The RTO did a double take. He didn’t like what he saw. “Hey, boss, boss, isn’t this the OP?” he said, pointing at the screen. “Hey, I’ll be right with you,” Jimmy replied over his shoulder. The Delta major concluded his chat, stood up, and turned around. His RTO pointed again to the top of the mountain on the digital map. “Here’s where their LZ is plotted,” the RTO said. Almost a hundred miles to the south, the black Chinook slowed to a hover over the top of Takur Ghar.

…

His job was to coordinate the efforts of all the other planners in the division staff and subordinate units. Ziemba, a slender brunette who as a West Point cadet had somehow acquired the incongruous nickname “Ox,” was the plans officer in the division’s intelligence section. “Okay, where’s some enemy activity?” Wille asked the intel officer. “Right here,” she said, indicating a digital map display on her laptop, her finger pointing right at the Shahikot. “There’s some enemy activity in this valley.” The Shahikot area had been a mujahideen stronghold during the Soviet-Afghan war, she added. To Wille that seemed as good a place as any for which to plan an operation. He and Ziemba applied themselves to the task assiduously.

…

They finally found a way east through the Gawyani Ghar ridgeline. The operators navigated using Falcon-View maps loaded into laptops that they carried in pouches on the ATVs’ gas tanks, where the operators could easily access them. The laptops were fitted with GPS receivers, so the team members were able to trace their own movements on the digital map in real time. They were tracked by a Joint STARS surveillance aircraft designed to spot moving vehicles. The crew on the Joint STARS, one of several spy planes supporting the recce missions, reported to the team that they could see additional movement in the area. The Juliet operators were in an area where an enemy bunker with a DShK had been reported.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson
Published 18 Oct 2006

A suburban cul-de-sac is unlikely to have a significant number of Web pages associated with it. But a streetcorner in a big city might well have a hundred interesting links: personal stories, reviews about the hot new bar around the corner, a potential date who lives three blocks away, a hidden gem of a bookstore—perhaps even a warning about a contaminated water fountain. These digital maps are tools for making new kinds of sidewalk connections, which is why they are likely to be less useful in communities without sidewalk culture. The bigger the city, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to make an interesting link, because the overall supply of social groups and watering holes and local knowledge is so vast.

…

B., 50, 61 Chloride of lime, 112–13 Chloroform, 66–67, 145 Snow and, 65 Cholera, 22, 32–35, 37–39, 52 Angola outbreak, 284n “blue stage,” 138 East End outbreak, 209 fear of, 86 modernization of infrastructure and, 214 recovery from, 111 remedies, 47–51 Snow and, 69–77, 98–100, 276n theories of spread, 68–74, 98, 122–23, 131–32, 146–48, 171 water as cure for, 45 See also Broad Street (Soho), cholera outbreak; Vibrio cholerae (cholera bacteria) Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine, 259 Cholera in Berwick Street, The (Whitehead), 169–72 Cities, 84–85, 91–97, 231 benefits of, 237–39 crowded, and transmission of cholera, 41–42 in developing countries, 215–16 digital maps of, 220–22 and disease, 235 and environment, 238 flow of ideas, 225–26 infrastructure projects, 214 largest, 215–16 medieval system, 282–83n modern, 232–33, 281–82n nineteenth-century view, 88–91 post-9/11, 283n See also Towns City-planet, 232, 234–35 biological warfare and, 252 safety of, 254–55 threats to, 236, 239 City Press (London), 205 Civilization, 92 barbarism and, 14–15 and smell, 130 Clark, James, 66 Coevolutionary development, 246 Coffee, 104 Coffeehouses, 281n Colosseum (Rome), 5 Communications Internet, 218–19 and medicine, 45–47 in Victorian-era London, 82–83 Complex systems, waste recycling and, 6 Composting pits, 5 COMPSTAT system, 223–24 Confirmation bias, 186–87 Consciousness, human, 44 “Consilience of Inductions, The” (Whewell), 67 Consumers, in cities, 92 Contagion theory of cholera spread, 69–71 Cooper, Edmund, 191–93, 194 Coral reefs, 6–7 Corpses, in Victorian-era London, 13–16 Cost of cholera cures, 47–48 Cow-dung–fueled generators, 217 Craven, Earl of, 15–16 Craven’s Field, 16 Cross Street (Soho), cholera deaths, 139–41 CTX phage, 246 Cubbitt, Thomas, 120 Cummings, Alexander, 11–12 Daily News (London), 191 Death from cholera, 52 in cities, 84–85 Death and Life of the Great American City (Jacobs), 235 Decomposition, bacteria-driven, 7, 129–30 Dehydration, of cholera, 38–39, 246 Developing countries cholera outbreaks, 215 population control, 234 Dickens, Charles, 14–15, 127–28, 134 Bleak House, 13–14, 84–85, 88 and children, 84 Hard Times, 29 Little Dorrit, 29 Nicholas Nickleby, 17 Our Mutual Friend, 2 Diffusion of gases, law of, 145–46 Digital networks, 222 Disease, cities and, 235–36 Divine will, Whitehead and, 170 DNA-based weapons, 251 Doctor of Medicine, 59–60 Snow as, 61–62 Doctors, and treatment of cholera, 50–51 Doctors Without Borders, 284n Dog excrement, recycling of, 217–18 Dot mapping, 192–94 Drinking water contaminated, 40, 42, 43–44 safe, 217 Drug companies, price gouging by, 48 East End, London, cholera outbreak, 209 East London Water Company, 209–11 Ebola virus, 243 Ecosystems, waste recycling and, 6 Ehrlich, Paul, 234 Electricity, 214 Elevation, cholera deaths and, 101–2 Eley, Susannah, 30–31, 77, 81, 143, 186 Eley brothers, 28, 30–31, 81, 143 Eley Brothers factory, 28, 31, 81, 143, 153 Eliot, George, 167 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 11 Enclosure movement, 94 Energy, cities and, 92–94 Engels, Friedrich, 13, 14–15, 127–28, 260 Environment changes in, and evolution of bacteria, 43–44 in cities, 221–25 organisms and, 40 Environmental health, cities and, 233, 238, 281–82n Epidemics, 227 and history, 32 maps of, 219 population density and, 243 Snow and, 147–48 Epidemiological Society, 193 Epidemiology, 97, 194, 218 Ethanol, 104 Ether, 63–65, 144–45 Eukaryotic cells, 36, 264n Evolution of disease organisms, 42–44 and sense of smell, 129–30 “Exciting” causes of disease, 132–33 Excrement eating, cholera bacterium and, 40–42 Experiments, Snow and, 65 Experimentum crucis, 75, 76–77, 102, 106–9, 143, 153 Board of Health and, 186–87 Farm animals, in Victorian-era London, 27–28 Farming, efficiency of, 92–93 Farming system, disruption of, 94 Farr, William, 69, 73, 79, 80, 100–102, 127–28, 136, 148, 168, 225 and East End cholera outbreak, 209–12 records of, 140, 141–42, 272n and waterborne theory, 211–12 Weekly Returns of Birth and Deaths, 100–101, 102, 106, 127, 132, 150, 153, 166, 177, 191 and “Great Stink,” 204 and waterborne theory, 204 Fear, urban life and, 84–87 Ferguson, Daniel, 64 Fermentation, 104 Fertilizer, human waste as, 115–16 Fleet River, 119 Folk remedies, 46, 49–50 Fossil fuels, limited supply, 237–39 French novels, of nineteenth century, 84 Frerichs, Ralph, 259 Freud, Sigmund, 134 Full House (Gould), 36 G (Mr., tailor), 29, 31, 32, 34–35 General Board of Health, 112–13, 118.

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy
by Robert Peters
Published 18 May 2014

The combination proved highly effective and made Goodreads a prime prospective partner for Amazon’s continuously evolving book/reader ecosystem. Waze The free turn-by-turn navigation app Waze debuted in Israel in 2008 and in six years became a worldwide phenomenon that has redefined how people cope with one of the greatest headaches of the modern world — traffic. The app provides layers of information on top of digital maps that help drivers avoid traffic snarls. These include the location of road work, car accidents, and law enforcement speed traps as well as extras like the location of the cheapest gas available on a driver’s given route. The company’s stated goal is to shave at least 5 minutes off every user’s daily travel time with community-edited maps that are constantly being updated and improved.

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska
Published 5 Jun 2024

: ‘Benoit Mandelbrot’, interview by Anthony Barcellos, in Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews, ed. Donald J. Albers and Gerald L. Alexanderson, 2nd ed. (Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 2008), 213–32. covered by a grid of tiny squares: Sven Kreiss, ‘S2 Cells and Space-Filling Curves: Keys to Building Better Digital Map Tools for Cities’, Sidewalk Talk, 29 July 2016, https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/s2-cells-and-space-filling-curves-keys-to-building-better-digital-map-tools-for-cities-a312aa5e2f59. looks over Rio de Janeiro from ‘41204668869’: S2 Region Coverer Online Viewer, accessed 4 February 2024, https://igorgatis.github.io/ws2/?cells=00997fd59c5. purposefully incomprehensible: Benoit Mandelbrot, ‘How Long Is the Coast of Britain?

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Nov 2010

While they are poor substitutes for the full spectrum of nature, they are great models for particular systems that we would have no way to isolate from their contexts in the real world. A weather system can be studied purely in terms of pressure zones, a financial market can be analyzed through the axes of supply and demand, and a digital map can represent the world in terms of wealth, violence, or real-time births. Because digital simulations are numerical models, many choices about them must be made in advance. Models are necessarily reductive. They are limited by design. This does not negate their usefulness; it merely qualifies it.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

LOOKING INTO A SEE-THROUGH WORLD January 31, 2008 THE CITIZENS OF BARROW GURNEY in southwestern England have asked that their village be erased from digital maps. Like many towns around the world, Barrow Gurney has been overrun by cars and trucks whose drivers robotically follow the instructions dispensed by GPS systems. The shortest route between two points sometimes runs right through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets. A new generation of digital maps may make things worse. Connected directly to the internet, they provide drivers with a stream of real-time information about traffic congestion, accidents, and road construction.

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World
by Greg Milner
Published 4 May 2016

A dead reckoning mapping system should be fairly easy to design, they decided. Honey, an admirer of traditional Pacific wayfinding, suggested they call the company Etak. Etak’s innovation was to augment dead reckoning with map-matching algorithms that allowed the system to compare physical locations with digital map data. A car outfitted with an Etak system had special tire rims that provided a more accurate read than a standard odometer, and the distance traveled was calculated based on wheel rotations. A compass kept track of the car’s direction. For the map-matching component, Etak took publicly available maps compiled by the U.S.

…

Around the time I was trying to track down Robert Gable, né Schwitzgebel (both brothers changed their surname to Gable), I heard about the development of the world’s smallest GPS tracker, tiny enough to attach to a bee. I imagined an entire swarm of tracked bees, and trying to make sense of the patterns and lines their movements would leave on a digital map. If every member of the swarm is tracked, that is a form of egalitarianism, right? When I reached Robert on the phone, Ralph was in poor health. (He died in 2015.) But Robert was in good spirits, describing the playful aspect he and his brother believed was important to their idea of positive reinforcement through tracking.

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot
by Mark Vanhoenacker
Published 1 Jun 2015

Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa that also marks the official boundary between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, was named Cabo das Agulhas, the Cape of Needles, because five centuries ago Portuguese sailors noticed that magnetic and true north were nearly aligned here. Nowadays, pilots on a modern airliner can choose to display either type of heading. At the flick of a small switch the whole compass rose on our digital map will rotate left or right. It is a disconcerting moment when you first see a compass, which you imagine as a deep and incorruptible arbiter of direction, spin like a top. Most of the time we fly on magnetic headings. The reason for this is largely historical. In the early days of aviation, pilots—like birds and mariners—only had magnetic directions to choose from, because they only had magnetic compasses.

…

He is speaking to one of the crew in the galley. The flight attendant brings him to the cockpit and I introduce him to the captain, one of the most senior in the company at the time, who smiles as my dad takes my picture in front of the controls. I explain a few of the buttons and systems to him, show him the digital map of our route. Though now a naturalized American, he is proud, I think, that I have started my career on a European airliner. We hear the muffled ka-thump of the main cabin door closing, a starter gun familiar to waiting airline pilots everywhere. I reach for my headset, a little embarrassed that I have to ask my dad to leave the cockpit and go to his seat.

The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Published 2 May 2000

The train itself is another object, and so is the countryside through which it travels. "The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital map of France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of First Class to Geneva send out their own team of surveyors to make a new map of France? No, of course they didn't. They used existing data-a digital map of the world that is available to any maker of ractives who needs it, for a price of course. That digital map is a separate object. It resides in the memory of a computer somewhere. Where exactly? I don't know. Neither does the ractive itself. It doesn't matter.

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey
by Richard Whittle
Published 26 Apr 2010

Instrument readings would be projected on a glass Heads Up Display in front of each pilot, visible through the goggles. Each pilot could call up a moving digital map on a display in front of him by punching a button. To see other things inside the cockpit, the pilots would have to peer under or to the side of their goggles, but the eight MOTT pilots had used night-vision goggles often before. As usual, they also would navigate by instruments to checkpoints along the way, flying to specific altitudes over specific locations at specific times. Each checkpoint would be easy to see on the digital map. From a cruising altitude of 9,500 feet, they would descend to a checkpoint at 5,000 feet as they neared Marana, then to one at 3,000 feet above sea level, putting them about 1,000 feet over the ground.

…

If they do, their cockpit displays will go blank for ten seconds or so as the two mission computers synchronize their data. During that time, Wright and Bianca will have to fly with a “black cockpit”—no primary instrument displays of their speed, altitude, fuel, engine performance, etc.—and no digital map. They decide to reboot the computer when they get on the ground. Soon after this, less than a minute after the F-18 radios that LZ Swan is cold, there are more distractions. As Bianca and the leader of the troops in the back discuss how long their Osprey will need to stay on the ground at Marana, Bianca drops something in the darkened cockpit.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

The initial version of Lyft, he explains, was designed to attract an initial customer base “in every market.” Having achieved that, he continues, “Now we get to play that next card and start matching up people to take rides.”3 Uber isn’t taking the competition lightly. To try to ensure that its ride-sharing service out-competes Lyft’s, Uber has joined the bidding for Here, a digital mapping service owned by Nokia that is the chief alternative to Google Maps. Uber hopes to buy Here and use its mapping power to produce swift and accurate ride-sharing matches more effectively than any other service.4 In other cases, ideas for new interactions emerge from experience, observation, and necessity.

…

Rajiv Banker, Sabyasachi Mitra, and Vallabh Sambamurthy, “The Effects of Digital Trading Platforms on Commodity Prices in Agricultural Supply Chains,” MIS Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2011): 599–611. 3. “Hop In and Shove Over,” Businessweek, February 2, 2015. 4. Mark Scott and Mike Isaac, “Uber Joins the Bidding for Here, Nokia’s Digital Mapping Service,” New York Times, May 7, 2015. 5. Adam Lashinsky, “Uber Banks on World Domination,” Fortune, October 6, 2014. 6. J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, no. 4 (1984): 277–88. 7. Steve Lohr, “First the Wait for Microsoft Vista; Now the Marketing Barrage,” New York Times, January 30, 2007. 8.

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

Chamal turned to Junius, gazing directly into his eyes. Junius and Zeng Xinlan exchanged glances. “Of course you’re important,” replied Zeng Xinlan. She looked at Chamal, her face solemn. “Even the most advanced AI makes mistakes. What if an explosion destroys a road, making it impossible to follow the digital map, or there’s a natural disaster that suddenly creates chaos? This is when people like you come in—a hero to save the day.” “But I don’t want to be a hero,” Chamal blurted out. “I only want to play games, earn some points, and help out my family.” Junius evaded Chamal’s gaze. All of a sudden, Zeng Xinlan let out a giggle and broke the awkward silence.

…

An autonomous vehicle driven by AI, rather than a human, uses neural networks instead of the brain and mechanical components instead of hands and feet. For example, AI perception uses cameras, LiDAR, and radar to sense its surroundings. AI navigation does route planning by associating every point on the road to a point on a high-definition digital map. AI inference uses algorithms to predict the intent of cars or pedestrians. AI decision-making and planning rely on expert rules or statistical estimation to make decisions, such as how to react to the presence of an obstacle when detected, and what to do if that obstacle moves. Autonomous vehicles will mature one step at a time, from assisting the human driver to eventually no longer requiring a human driver.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

Perhaps the biggest underlying change of the past fifteen years that’s made exploring land ownership easier is the development of digital technologies. Until the 1990s, cartography was mostly still done on paper. Since then, the growth of GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping tools has transformed how maps can be made and shared. An EU directive called INSPIRE has forced the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to publish digital maps showing the outlines of all land parcels in England and Wales – but not who owns them, and with licensing restrictions in place on reproducing the maps. Machine-readable datasets and open-source software have made it easier to analyse complex datasets detailing who owns land, while modern web mapping allows us to create powerful online maps.

…

Part of the problem is that the data on what companies own still isn’t good enough to prove whether or not land banking is occurring. Anna has tried to map the land owned by housing developers, but has been thwarted by the lack in the Land Registry’s corporate dataset of the necessary information to link data on who owns a site with digital maps of that area. That makes it very hard to assess, for example, whether a piece of land owned by a housebuilder for decades is a prime site accruing in value or a leftover fragment of ground from a past development. Second, the scope of Letwin’s review was drawn too narrowly to examine the wider problem of land banking by landowners beyond the major housebuilders.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches
by Marshall Brain
Published 6 Apr 2015

An airplane did not need a vision system -- its "vision" was radar, and radar had been around for more than half a century. There was also a secondary backup system that gave airplanes a form of consciousness. Airplanes could detect their exact location using GPS systems. These GPS systems were married to very detailed digital maps of the ground and the airspace over the ground. The maps told the airplane where every single building and structure was on the ground. So even if the autopilot failed and told the plane to go somewhere unsafe, a "conscious" plane would refuse to fly there. It was, quite literally, impossible for a conscious plane to fly into a building -- the plane "knew" that flying into a building was "wrong."

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

At a similar facility, embedded within San Diego’s only TV and movie studio, amputee Marines returning from Iraq ‘would go out on patrol with their squad’ through the hybrid physical and virtual spaces of the simulated Iraqi city, reports Stu Segall, owner of the studio. ‘A bomb would explode, and we’d pretend they lost a leg’.53 Fort Sill’s operators imagine that simulations will soon be modified to project real satellite and digital mapping data from Iraq or other urban warfare locations, so that, as project director Colonel Gary Kinne puts it, ‘individuals could train on the actual terrain that they would occupy someday – maybe in future theatre of war’.54 Simulated smells like those used in physical facilities are also envisaged.

…

APPROPRIATION A third strategy for the building of countergeographies involves the very technologies of control that are so central to the new military urbanism and that offer excellent potential for appropriation and reverse engineering. Indeed, a whole universe of experiments in what are called ‘locative’ or ‘ambient’ media seek to challenge contemporary cultures of militarized urbanism by exploring new uses of infrastructures and technologies such as GPS, radio frequency (RFID) chips, unmanned drones, digital mapping, satellite surveillance, video simulation, data mining, Internet communications and wireless communications–all of which more or less originated through military research. The emphasis here is first to demystify and make visible the invisible technologies of control, tracking, and surveillance which now thoroughly permeate everyday objects, architectures, environments and infrastructures, and then to redeploy them in counter-hegemonic ways.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

It is too soon to tell whether Africa will pull together or succumb to another round of divide and rule. The answer will reveal itself only by watching the supply chain tug-of-war. FROM SYKES-PICOT TO PAX ARABIA While embedded with U.S. Special Operations Forces in 2007, I witnessed firsthand America’s incredible ability to apply technology to the battlefield. The digital map layered on Iraq’s topography was rich with satellite feeds, drone surveillance, heat maps of local violence, real-time situation reports from troops on the ground, and other forms of human and signals intelligence. With about two hours’ notice, special ops teams could strike anywhere in the country.

…

.*2 Today at least three hundred undersea Internet cables crisscross the earth like yarn wrapped around a ball, carrying 99 percent of intercontinental data traffic.*3 When faraway places enjoy enhanced connectivity, the meaning attached to their location begins to change. Just one fiber cable has propelled Kenya onto the digital map, with Google, IBM, MasterCard, and other companies setting up research labs in the budding “Silicon Savannah.” The landlocked countries Uganda and Zambia both got their first fiber-optic cables connected from the Indian Ocean in 2014. They are still physically landlocked but digitally connected.

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
by Edward Brooke-Hitching
Published 3 Nov 2016

After further checking, they found that, although clearly shown on Google Maps, it did not appear on the navigational charts of the ship. The missing island was initially attributed to a technical error in the data sets, including that used by Google; however, the case of Sandy Island is representative of the problem that occasionally arises from the fact that modern digital maps are drawn from a combination of data from satellite imagery and some of the oldest maps of the British Admiralty. In this instance, it’s entirely possible the phantom can be traced back to 1774, when Captain James Cook recorded a ‘Sandy Island’ at a location 260 miles (420km) further east, with a four-degree difference in longitude.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

It’s digital heaven for those who know how to ascend, and something else entirely for those of us left behind. In fact, the most devout holders of The Mindset seek to go meta on themselves, convert into digital form, and migrate to that realm as robots, artificial intelligences, or mind clones. Once they’re there, living in the digital map rather than the physical territory, they will insulate themselves from what they don’t like through simple omission. Just as our proprietary GPS maps don’t show us the restaurants that refuse to advertise on the platform, the digital landscape to which they have migrated will be free of poverty, pollution, and whatever else the rest of us have to deal with.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Published 6 Mar 2007

Determining the intersections of demand and supply curves to optimize inventory and minimize overstocks and stockouts. Typically involves such issues as arrival processes, waiting times, and throughput losses. Location analysis. Optimization of locations for stores, distribution centers, manufacturing plants, and so on. Increasingly uses geographic analysis and digital maps to, for example, relate company locations to customer locations. Modeling. Creating models to simulate, explore contingencies, and optimize supply chains. Many of these approaches employ some form of linear programming software and solvers, which allow programs to seek particular goals, given a set of variables and constraints.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen. When I did some research into how courier systems worked, I found that there was a parallel information transfer that was digital, and it was called ‘dispatch,’ which was just a coordination effort.” Jack so loved the idea of digitally mapping interactions around a city and the notion of couriers as a physical manifestation of these interactions that he decided to start a bicycle courier service of his own at the age of sixteen. “I put my brother and me on bikes, just so I could write the dispatch software. [A self-proclaimed computer geek, Jack taught himself to code software at a young age.]

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering
by Ann K. Finkbeiner
Published 16 Aug 2010

Back in the mid-1990s, before Alex Szalay and Jim Gray met, Alex had been talking to astronomers at an all-sky infrared survey called 2MASS about Sloan and 2MASS using the same structures for their archives so that the sky could be accessible in both wavelengths. Maybe, Alex thought, they could merge the Sloan survey with several other surveys in still other wavelengths to make a digital map of the sky in all wavelengths. Astronomers have always segregated themselves by wavelength: infrared astronomers rarely talked to ultraviolet astronomers, nor did they use each other’s data. The reason was not narrow-mindedness, but incompatible technology: the length of the waves in the whole electromagnetic spectrum of light range from gamma rays that are the size of the nucleus of an atom, a quadrillionth of a meter, to radio waves measured in meters; as a result, the telescopes for each band of wavelengths must be wildly different.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 9 May 2022

Our digital economy gives us many things for free, things that won’t show up in GDP. A recent analysis tried to figure out how much some of these services are worth to people by asking them how much they’d have to be paid to give them up. They estimated that search engines are worth $17,530 every year to the average American; email is worth $8,414; digital maps $3,648; and social media $322. We pay $0 for these services. Pretty amazing! Next, the happiness data. Over this same period, reported happiness, at least in the United States, hasn’t gone up. In 1972, the first year the GSS collected data, when GDP per capita was less than half as high and nobody had Google or Google Maps or Gmail, 30 percent of Americans said they were “very happy,” roughly identical to the number today.

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
by David A. Mindell
Published 12 Oct 2015

Most of the amphoras were quite varied in appearance, although three identical ones lay, almost as if they had been lashed together, in a single crater. The seafloor, apparently flat to my naked eye peering through the window, actually had a gentle crescent just a few centimeters high that marked the outline of Skerki D’s ship’s hull, buried just below the mud line. When we showed the digital maps to one of the archaeologists on board, he exclaimed, “You’ve just done in four hours what I spent seven years doing on the last site I excavated.” Yet no scuba-diving archaeologist ever had a map nearly as detailed and precise as our map of Skerki D—in fact, it was the most precise map ever made of the ocean floor, albeit of a tiny square in the vast ocean.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

. $1 billion local commerce 2017 Xiaohongshu Lead Co-inv. $300 million social e-commerce 2018 Ofo Inv. $866 million bike sharing 2018 SenseTime Inv. $600 million facial recognition 2018 Ofo Inv. $700 million bike sharing 2017 Youku Tudou Acq. $4 billion video sharing 2016 Weibo Inv. $720 million micro-blogging 2016 AutoNavi Acq. $1.5 billion digital mapping 2014 * Note–Inv. is investment; Co-inv. is co-investment; Acq. is acquisition; Lead Inv. is lead investment; Lead Co-inv. is lead co-investment; Und. is undisclosed Sources: Silicon Dragon research, S&P Global Intelligence, annual reports, news releases In the United States, Alibaba has had a mixed record of M&A deals.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Among other things, travellers can see when two buses are about to arrive at once and even time their journey to avoid a last-minute dash. So if everyone just followed their phones, would we need to care about the quality of maps? The answer to that question is a resounding yes, for three important psychological reasons. Digital maps may discourage us from thinking about alternatives Would you pay to ride the underground just 300 metres if doing so would mean you arrived later than if you’d just walked? It turns out that nearly 1,000 people per week did exactly that – between Leicester Square and Covent Garden in London – in 2019.14 By the time they had reached the platform, they could have walked to their destination above ground.

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
by Bradley Hope
Published 1 Nov 2022

The group put together a hundred-day stabilization plan that totaled hundreds of pages. Each topic had a planning commission, or a task force, helmed by members of the group. The commissions ranged from food security and public health to national heritage and energy planning. There were task forces for mobile banking and microfinance, demographics and digital mapping. Under Adrian’s framework for the Joseon Institute, an ordinary primary school teacher could take her real-world experience and mash it together with research about totalitarian states to create the beginnings of a plan for what to teach young North Koreans the day after the fall of the regime.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Even when the information is wrong or misleading, they believe it. Their trust in the software becomes so strong that they ignore or discount other sources of information, including their own senses. If you’ve ever found yourself lost or going around in circles after slavishly following flawed or outdated directions from a GPS device or other digital mapping tool, you’ve felt the effects of automation bias. Even people who drive for a living can display a startling lack of common sense when relying on satellite navigation. Ignoring road signs and other environmental cues, they’ll proceed down hazardous routes and sometimes end up crashing into low overpasses or getting stuck in the narrow streets of small towns.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
by Mo Gawdat
Published 29 Sep 2021

Enjoy all the videos, be they entertainment, education or news, that stream through thin air to your device from all over the world. Think about all of the messages and content, silly as it may seem, that your friends share with you on social media. Don’t be a stranger. Video call one of them and see how they laugh at your jokes. Text another and plan to meet for coffee. Send them a pin on a digital map and let their phone guide them there. Search for anything. Just ask and you will receive millions of answers. Observe how your phone now understands your spoken words and obeys your every command. Enjoy tens of millions of songs – every song you’ve ever heard or loved – ready to play at your command.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

Designed by Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen in 2005, the upside-down teardrop quickly became a global shorthand, earning a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection. Rasmussen’s icon epitomizes the power of digital media over print. Search all the world’s printed road maps and atlases. Never will you find the most important information you can get from a map—where you are and where you’re going. The digital map user is never lost. That’s because a GPS-enabled map has something extra. It knows where the user is. This is self-locating or indexical information. Those are fancy terms for something we largely take for granted. “Indexical” refers to the index finger, pointing to someone or something. “You are here.”

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

The CMU team had an edge over the other competitors. They had been working on computer-controlled vehicles for years already. ALVINN, a self-driving van, launched at CMU in 1989.3 There was a stroke of enormous good fortune during the development period. Google founder Larry Page happened to become very interested in digital mapping. He attached a bunch of cameras to the outside of a panel van and drove around Mountain View, California, filming the landscape and turning the images into maps. Google then turned the van project into its massive Google Street View mapping program. Page’s vision fit nicely with tech developed by the previously mentioned CMU professor Sebastian Thrun, who was active with the DARPA Challenge team.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the future sometimes appears in the unlikeliest of places. And the European country that is pioneering a better digital society by combining free market innovation with equally creative regulatory and educational reforms in order to put people back in the center of the digital map is the little Baltic republic of Estonia—or E-stonia, as Toomas Hendrik Ilves, its digitally savvy former president, calls it. So let’s return to Estonia. Where stuff happens first. CHAPTER FOUR UTOPIA: A CASE STUDY (BOOK ONE) A Country in the Cloud Fortunately, not everyone in Estonia is as miserable as Jaan Tallinn.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Sedran compared the complexity of developing an autonomous driving system that could function in any condition as being “like a manned mission to Mars,” and estimated it would never work on a global scale. In his view, at least five more years of development would be necessary, but that was not all. You need latest-generation mobile infrastructure everywhere, as well as high-definition digital maps that are constantly updated. And you still need near-perfect road markings. This will only be the case in very few cities. And even then, the technology will only work in ideal weather conditions. If there are large puddles on the road in heavy rain, that’s already a factor forcing a driver to intervene.19 Sedran described what has become apparent to many of the people working on and paying attention to the development of autonomous vehicles.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Whatever you think about these companies, when you look at how many of us flock to their platforms and what we state that we like about them, there is no doubt that they have created enormous value. An interview-based survey showed that if some of the most common services disappeared, people would be willing to pay imaginary sums for them. They would be willing to pay an incredible average of $18,000 for search engines, $8,000 for email and $3,600 for digital maps – per year. If you included just these three services in US GDP per capita by the price people would be willing to pay, the average American would suddenly appear to be 50 per cent richer.21 These tech giants have created products of absolutely enormous value that they give to us for almost nothing.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

New Layers Yield New Recipes Digital information isn’t just the lifeblood for new kinds of science; it’s the second fundamental force (after exponential improvement) shaping the second machine age because of its role in fostering innovation. Waze is a great example here. The service is built on multiple layers and generations of digitization, none of which have decayed or been used up since digital goods are non-rival. The first and oldest layer is digital maps, which are at least as old as personal computers.22 The second is GPS location information, which became much more useful for driving when the U.S. government increased its GPS accuracy in 2000.23 The third is social data; Waze users help each other by providing information on everything from accidents to police speed traps to cheap gas; they can even use the app to chat with one another.

2034: A Novel of the Next World War
by Elliot Ackerman and James Admiral Stavridis
Published 15 Mar 2021

Behind her sat Quint, along with Hooper, the pair of them tuning their radios through a desert of static, searching for a return signal. “Are you sure you’ve got the right frequency?” Hunt asked Quint, trying to restrain her growing impatience. Quint, lost in his task, didn’t reply. Beside the digital map was a video teleconference split between two screens. The first screen was INDOPACOM, a conclave of admirals with furrowed brows calling in from Hawaii, none of whom had much to say. The second screen was the White House Situation Room, a smaller group that comprised Hendrickson, another staffer who Hunt didn’t know but who introduced himself as Chowdhury, and in the background Trent Wisecarver, who she recognized from television and who kept getting up to refill his cup of coffee.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order
by Bruno Macaes
Published 25 Jan 2018

Since I boarded a plane from Ili to Beijing on 15 June 2016, the first rule dictated that, even though I would continue to travel while doing research for the book, the Eurasian journey was effectively over. From Astrakhan to Khorgas by the longest possible route. We are living in a golden age of travelling. Recent technology, like digital maps and translators, together with all the constantly updated information on the internet, eliminate almost all sources of hassle or danger, but at the same time the destructive impact of tourism remains limited to the same popular spots, leaving much of the world either as it was centuries ago or as it has become as a result of modernization, and both states are equally genuine and important.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
by Barry Meier
Published 17 May 2021

The supposed consultant had a LinkedIn profile with five hundred connections but Satter couldn’t find any real-world references to him or his firm in directories. For his part, Scott-Railton observed Black Cube’s digital producers build the website of CPW Consulting. At one point, an ad appeared on the firm’s LinkedIn page looking for a digital mapping specialist. The opening was genuine. It just wasn’t for a job at CPW Consulting. Scott-Railton ran phrases from the posting through Google and discovered that a local British housing authority had posted the job on its website. Someone at Black Cube, it appeared, had copied the ad and, after making slight modifications, pasted it onto CPW’s page.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates
Published 2 May 2022

Researchers can then use that sample, after certain private data about you has been removed, to test for other pathogens and understand what’s happening throughout the community. Just by being sick, you’re contributing to science. In the Seattle Flu Study, the idea was that all the samples gathered from hospitals and public places would be tested. When one tested positive for the flu, the case would be marked on a digital map showing, nearly in real time, where the known flu cases were. Then the virus would go through a further step: Its genetic code would be studied and compared with genes from other flu viruses found around the world. This genetic work would be a key part of the Seattle Flu Study, because it would let the scientists understand how different cases were related to one another.

The Zenith Angle
by Bruce Sterling
Published 27 Apr 2004

That wasn’t the part that scared him. No, the scary part was what space telescopes had done to the Earth. Pinecrest Ranch was easily visible from space. Any passing cosmonaut could see the place with the naked eye. The National Reconnaissance Office, as a meaningful gesture to a favorite supplier, had sent DeFanti a digital map of his whole Colorado spread. The NRO had given Pinecrest Ranch the same loving attention that they gave to the garish palaces of Saddam Hussein. All the NRO data was stuffed inside DeFanti’s laptop now. It wasn’t just a flat simple map, oh, no. It was an interactive, topographic, 3-D computer model map, military-style, just like the Delta Force studied before they parachuted into some hellhole in the middle of nowhere.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

The usual pattern, of course, is that once automation tackles relatively primitive tasks it moves up the ladder of complexity. We see no reason why this wouldn’t happen in surgery over the next couple of decades. Autonomous vehicles are another area of intelligent technology involving physical tasks—moving and getting things around. These vehicles employ a combination of GPS and digital maps, light radar (“lidar”), video cameras, and ultrasonic, radar, and odometry sensors to generate and analyze a massive amount of data about the vehicle’s position and surroundings. We probably don’t have to tell you too much about this area, because it gets more than its share of media attention.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan
Published 8 Mar 2016

But even pedestrians need infrastructure. We’ve all experienced the frustration of being lost or pointed in the wrong direction by a seemingly knowledgeable local. Taking a page out of London’s successful wayfinding playbook, we put New York neighborhoods on the map with the city’s first coordinated sign system for pedestrians. While digital maps can be called up on any smartphone, there’s still enormous convenience in having physical, freestanding maps on sidewalks, like those that Transport for London positioned along city streets—known as Legible London. We placed the sleek, eight-foot-high monoliths mostly within the sidewalk curb zones, inviting people to determine their location and their next step without being stampeded.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside
by Dieter Helm
Published 7 Mar 2019

There are bird atlases, plant atlases, insect and butterfly atlases, and reptile and amphibian atlases, and there are New Naturalist studies on specific species and habitats. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have brought much of this together in the ‘State of Nature’ reports, led by the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).5 Steps to develop more comprehensive databases, using the full panoply of digital mapping techniques, will shortly give us a real-time and extremely detailed understanding of exactly what is going on. This is not the place to try to provide a comprehensive summary. It is both beyond the scope of this book, and well beyond the abilities of an economist to construct. The direction of travel is, however, pretty clear, and it is this that we need to bear in mind in being realistic about the baselines, the scale of the challenges, and the disastrous consequences that will follow if we do nothing to hold the line.

Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars
by Dr Peter Lee
Published 14 Jul 2019

The voice of the JTAC filled their headsets: ‘We need you to go to this grid and match eyes with this other aircraft [i.e. train your Reaper camera on a target or area that is already being watched by another surveillance aircraft]. We’re looking to prosecute when you get there.’ As he read out the eight-digit map location in the Nowzad District of North Helmand, the three crew members all noted it down. The other aircraft – which can be either manned or unmanned – can then undertake another tasking, fly back to base or stay on station to help with a complex scenario. To find out which it would be, and what they were flying into, Jamie started to engage with his Supported Unit to get their tasking and latest intelligence.

A Short Ride in the Jungle
by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
Published 6 Apr 2014

Fortunately Don Duvall, the American biker I had met the previous year, has taken this matter into his own hands. Dubbed the Midnight Mapper, Don has spent the last decade mapping Laos from the back of his Honda dirt bike: to date recording more than 50,000 GPS points and producing an unrivalled digital map of the country. His findings, in the format of a $50 SIM card compatible with handheld GPS units, would be an invaluable asset to my journey. Some might say, 'Pah, that's cheating. She should be using a compass and the stars,' then throw down this book in disgust. But if I had opted for the old-fashioned method, I might have gone the same way as those early boi dois and still be lost and starving in the jungle.

The Martian
by Andy Weir
Published 1 Jan 2011

Venkat finished taking down the numbers. “Come with me,” he said, quickly walking out. “Um,” Mindy stammered, following after. “Where are we going?” “SatCon break room,” Venkat said. “You guys still have that map of Mars on the wall?” “Sure,” Mindy said. “But it’s just a poster from the gift shop. I’ve got high-quality digital maps on my computer—” “Nope. I can’t draw on those,” he said. Then, rounding the corner to the break room, he pointed to the Mars map on the wall. “I can draw on that.” The break room was empty save for a computer technician sipping a cup of coffee. He looked up in alarm as Venkat and Mindy stormed in.

Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan
by Sean Parnell and John Bruning
Published 28 Feb 2012

B-1 Lancer A supersonic long-range bomber that when loaded to max capacity, is capable of dropping over 125,000 pounds of ordnance in one flight. BFT Blue Force Tracker. A computer that mounts on the dash of a Humvee and tracks the location of all friendly forces in the area, displaying them on a digital map. blue-on-blue Military terminology for friendly-fire mishaps. breaking contact Military terminology that is synonymous with retreating on the battlefield. call sign A nickname used over the radio to identify units and people in combat. CCP Casualty Collection Point. The place where casualties are brought during battle.

Freedom
by Daniel Suarez
Published 17 Dec 2009

Ross pointed at creeks, rivers, and roads at the edge of the county. "Three-mile radius. They're setting up checkpoints on all roads, and they've got unmanned surveillance drones watching the terrain. They're cutting power lines, communications--all connection to the outside world. And we're not the only ones. . . ." Ross presented a digital map of the Midwestern U.S. "There are news feeds reporting similar blockades of towns in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana. . . . It's a carefully orchestrated campaign to isolate darknet communities." Sebeck studied the map. "And we're at the center of it." Ross tilted his head. "So we are."

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

But as Mattis discussed these technologies inside Google HQ three months later, he knew that navigating the relationship would require some delicacy. Mattis said he’d already seen the power of the company’s technology on the battlefield. After all, American adversaries were using Google Earth, an interactive digital map of the globe stitched together from satellite images, to identify mortar targets. But he was keen that the U.S. should up its game. Now, with Project Maven, the Defense Department wanted to develop AI that could not only read satellite images but also analyze video captured by drones much closer to the battlefield.

The Deepest Map
by Laura Trethewey
Published 15 May 2023

Inside a gleaming glass-and-brick NOAA building situated in the foothills of the Rockies is the International Hydrographic Organization’s Data Centre for Digital Bathymetry (DCDB). This archive, filled with rooms upon rooms of spinning disk drives, holds much of the world’s collective knowledge of the seafloor. Established in 1990 during the transition from paper to digital maps, the DCDB now holds nearly forty compressed terabytes’ worth of seafloor soundings. The biggest contributors to DCDB are the nearly fifty ships in the US academic fleet, but more data is flowing in all the time from government, industry, and academic mappers around the world. When Cassie’s hard drive arrived at the DCDB, her data would be absorbed into the larger grid.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

The same way that Netflix, Spotify, and Instagram algorithmically prioritize certain kinds of digital content that fit with each platform’s structure, other apps direct our attention toward places that similarly meet the platforms’ incentives. Airbnb guides users toward home rentals that match the algorithmic reflection of their desires; Google Maps highlights a personalized set of local institutions by emphasizing them on the digital map; and Yelp and Foursquare collate user reviews and engagement into ranked lists of restaurants, bars, and cafés. It’s strange to think of a “feed” existing outside of a screen, but these apps work like an algorithmic Netflix home page for physical space. You can scroll down the list and select the experience you want to have.

Into the Raging Sea
by Rachel Slade
Published 4 Apr 2018

El Faro was equipped with a third-party weather forecasting software package called Bon Voyage System (BVS). Its interface is lush, much more visually inviting than the all-caps text advisories coming from NOAA, which need to be plotted out by hand on the ship’s paper charts. On BVS, weather comes preplotted on a pastel-hued digital map. The tiny islands of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos appear as beige strands in a light blue sea. Mariners can plug in their ship’s course and fast-forward through time to watch how weather systems are predicted to behave as they sail to their destination. Click and it’s tomorrow. Here’s your ship (based on your projected speed and course) and here’s the weather.

Rust: The Longest War
by Jonathan Waldman
Published 10 Mar 2015

One hundred and five pages bore notes on the pig run, all written in pencil. Wasson tapped the book, and said, “This won’t break down. I can go without everything else.” That was a surveyor talking. Thirty-seven years old, Wasson could have talked until he turned forty about surveying methods, precision, corrections. In a long discourse on digital mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Wasson brought up the 2010 San Bruno, California, pipeline explosion. Pacific Gas and Electric, he said, knew that it had a deep pit, but thought the pit was on a thicker piece of pipe. “They had no integrity in their integrity management,” he said. Contrary to received wisdom on the lines, pig is not an acronym.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

“How do you create a map showing every road in the United States, with the precise location of every stop sign, all the lane markings, every exit ramp and every traffic light—and update it in real time as traffic is rerouted around construction and accidents? . . . ‘If we want to have autonomous cars everywhere, we have to have digital maps everywhere,’ said Amnon Shashua, chief technology officer at Mobileye, an Israeli company that makes advanced vision systems for automobiles.” Neal E. Boudette, “Building a Road Map for the Self-Driving Car,” New York Times, March 2, 2017. 8.Jody Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS,” New York Times Style Magazine, November 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/t-magazine/london-taxi-test-knowledge.html. 9.In much commentary and reportage, several unrelated developments get mixed up together: driverless cars, electric vehicles, and ride hailing.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

At first this data wasn’t particularly useful for AI researchers – until a professor called Fei-Fei Li set out to change that. Based at Stanford University, Li is a computer scientist specialising in the intersection of neuroscience and computer science – with a particular interest in how humans perceive objects. In 2009, driven by the idea that digitally mapping out as many real-world objects as possible would improve AI, Li set up ImageNet – a project that over a period of five years would single-handedly catalyse the explosion of useful AI. The site took the form of a meticulously detailed collection of 14,197,122 images, all hand-annotated with tags like ‘vegetable’, ‘musical instrument’, ‘sport’ and, yes, ‘dog’ and ‘cat’.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

However, a group of researchers decided to work with 33,000 drivers and, using a combination of dashboard-mounted GPS monitors and cloud-computing technology, were able to create an intelligent, real-time traffic service. Studying congestion on all 106,579 roads within the city, a distance of over 5,500 kilometres, they created a smart grid forming a digital map of the city. This was also integrated with weather and public-transit information. As a result, in testing, the new smart grid improved 60–70 per cent of all taxi trips and made them significantly faster. The smart city is being built from a combination of big city-hall projects alongside major software companies as well as more humble schemes that can be found on the 3 or 4G mobile in your pocket or the sat nav on the dashboard.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
by Jake Bittle
Published 21 Feb 2023

and stayed clogged for longer: Peter Coutu, “In Norfolk, Sea Level Rise Reduces Some Stormwater System Capacity by 50%, Data Shows,” Virginian-Pilot, January 3, 2021. shopping centers near the highway: On the occasion of Norfolk’s “Dutch Dialogues” discussion event to discuss sea-level rise, Troy Valos created a digital map overlay that layers recent maps of tidal flooding on top of historical creek bed locations within Norfolk. The maps show an almost one-to-one correspondence between areas that flood today and areas that used to be water or marshland. the ammunition depots: Nicholas Kusnetz, “Rising Seas Are Flooding Norfolk Naval Base, and There’s No Plan to Fix It,” Inside Climate News, October 25, 2017.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

Similar to the Whole Story Project, Geochicas aims to increase women’s representation among mappers in order to create maps that are more complete, well-rounded, and representative of the urban design needs of women. Created in 2016 in São Paulo, Brazil, the Geochicas mapping project is a digitally driven effort to augment our physical environment and help women navigate the spaces around them, and the initiative has helped increase the number of women contributing to digital mapping. The effort came out of the realization that a minuscule number of mappers contributing to the world’s largest crowdsourced database, OpenStreetMap, were female. Yeliz Osman, a gender violence expert at UN Women, explains that maps are representations of the world, nothing that “when women map, they are more likely than men to represent women’s specific needs and priorities, which is a key to driving change in local policies, plans and budgets.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Published 8 May 2023

It took twelve weeks and more than twenty surveyors. (Which seems bad until you remember how many days and nights it took Chrissy, Lindsay, and Jane to survey Chicago’s Wicker Park. In Los Angeles, it took two Coord workers two hours to get information on how a mile of curb was being used.) The resulting digital map offered vivid proof of the mess, not just in cities but between them: where Romaine Street crossed from Los Angeles to the city of West Hollywood midblock, two-hour free parking during the day and permit parking from 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. changed to unlimited free parking during the day and permit parking from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
Published 8 Mar 2016

“With Google and the Internet and all the information we have now, you can find answers to almost anything in seconds,” said Macon. “But South Avondale shows there’s a difference between finding an answer and understanding what it means.” II. In the past two decades the amount of information embedded in our daily lives has skyrocketed. There are smartphones that count our steps, websites that track our spending, digital maps to plot our commutes, software that watches our Web browsing, and apps to manage our schedules. We can precisely measure how many calories we eat each day, how much our cholesterol scores have improved each month, how many dollars we spent at restaurants, and how many minutes were allocated to the gym.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

And while there will no doubt come a point at which everyone alive will have been intimately acquainted with such artifacts and their interface conventions since earliest childhood, that point remains many years in the future. Until that time, many users will continue to experience the technics of everyday life as bewildering, overwhelming, even hostile. If we are occasionally brought up short by the complexities of interacting with digital maps, though, we can also be badly misled by the very opposite tendency, the smoothness and naturalness with which they present information to us. We tend to assume that our maps are objective accounts of the environment, diagrams that simply describe what is there to be found. In truth, they’re nothing of the sort; our sense of the world is subtly conditioned by information that is presented to us for interested reasons, and yet does not disclose that interest.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
by Dan Bouk
Published 22 Aug 2022

The woman in the background used a machine fixed in place, while the woman in the foreground showed off a new invention: a tabulator on wheels, literally being rolled out for the coming count.16 In years to come, bureau technicians developed optical mark recognition (OMR) technologies (a cousin to the pencil-shaded-bubble forms that were to become the bane of generations of students and SAT-takers), as well as pre-GPS, nation-spanning digital maps. According to the historians Steven Ruggles and Diana Magnuson, the Census Bureau lost ground as an innovator only because of a four-decade-long effort to trim the size of the government, which gutted the bureau’s technical staff, leaving gaps to be filled (often poorly) by private (usually military) contractors.17 Today’s internet giants rely on the hidden labor of low-wage workers to make their “smart” systems actually smart: so-called ghost workers perform simple, repetitive tasks that will later be credited to ineffably high-tech “AI.”18 In these practices, too, the Census Bureau helped lead the way—although their workers enjoyed greater protections.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

So I think there is merit in finding a good route that makes the power of this technology available in a good way.” The concerns of the vulnerable are not always so top of mind in Silicon Valley or even at Google. Years earlier the company sent cars with cameras mounted on their roofs out on public roads to create Street View. It was a cutting-edge feature of Google’s digital maps that allowed a user to pick a spot in the world and see a 3D photo of what it would look like if they were standing there, peering around. Google hadn’t considered that some people might be horrified that anyone in the world, with a click of a button, could virtually stand in front of their house.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

Musk did all of the original coding behind the service himself, while the more amiable Kimbal looked to ramp up the door-to-door sales operation. Musk had acquired a cheap license to a database of business listings in the Bay Area that would give a business’s name and its address. He then contacted Navteq, a company that had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create digital maps and directions that could be used in early GPS navigation-style devices, and struck a masterful bargain. “We called them up, and they gave us the technology for free,” said Kimbal. Musk merged the two databases together to get a rudimentary system up and running. Over time, Zip2’s engineers had to augment this initial data haul with more maps to cover areas outside of major metropolitan areas and to build custom turn-by-turn directions that would look good and work well on a home computer.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

The circuits of global capitalism and tourism – and in the case of my colleague and myself, travel for academic research – were not to be interrupted by a mere full-scale counterinsurgency war. Such violence could, since the airspace was ‘liberalised’ in 2008, simply be bypassed, the aircraft icon hovering on a digital map on a small screen, a banal signifier for passage over contested territory riven by violence.2 And so to our stopover: Dubai. By chance, we were in town during the ultimate stage-managed urban spectacle: the opening of the world’s tallest building, the 830-metre Burj Khalifa. Here, rather unexpectedly, was a place that, like few others, hammered home the growing need to appreciate the vertical aspects of geography and urbanism: a centre of extraordinary vertical politics and vertical geographies.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

They also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence.103 The possibilities were limited only by what contextual data could be fed and grafted onto a map: troop movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, cell phone locations. Keyhole gave an intelligence analyst, a commander in the field, or an air force pilot up in the air the kind of capability that we now take for granted: using digital mapping services on our computers and mobile phones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic conditions, and subway routes. “We could do these mashups and expose existing legacy data sources in a matter of hours, rather than weeks, months, or years,” an NGA official gushed a few years later.104 Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, but it owns a global array of media-interlinked companies and services including, in the United States: Fox Television; Fox Video; New York magazine; TV Guide; HarperCollins Publishers; Delphi Internet Services; Scott Foresman educational publishers; News and Electronic Data information services; Kesmai video game development corporation; Etak, Inc., the Digital map data company; Mirabella, the fashion magazine; and literally dozens of newspapers and independent television stations; and elsewhere, The Times of London along with the tabloid The Sun; Ansett Transport, an air cargo carrier; B Sky B, the English satellite broadcaster; Star TV, which is the Asian satellite network described above; Geographia Ltd., the cartography company; and Fox Video companies in Spain, Japan, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

According to a 2015 poll, a third of us would rather give up sex than the internet, which strongly suggests that ‘nothing’ doesn’t quite cover its contribution.29 One such study of the consumer surplus showed that we value the access to search engines at almost $18,000, email at more than $8000 and digital maps at $3600 annually. If we were to include just these three digital services in our measures of wealth, GDP per capita would be increased by roughly half!30 To get a more accurate sense of the overall consumer surplus, we would have to do the same thing with every small invention that now costs us very little.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

When Google started, it was one of many web search engines, but it quickly pulverized all its competitors. Now Google was starting to reveal its true ambition. On April Fools’ Day 2004, it launched an email service, Gmail, with so much unheard-of free data storage that people assumed it was a joke. Then it announced a massive, free digital map of the planet. And now Google, spigot of cash, hoarder of brilliant programmers, was coming for YouTube. When Hurley and his pals next met, a new agenda item appeared: Should we give up? * * * • • • Chad Hurley grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, and had landed in California the customary way: on a living room floor.

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
by P. W. Singer and August Cole
Published 28 Jun 2015

“We’ve got the old GPS coordinates of almost everything on the island from before the war down to the inch — not that we can use it for navigation,” he whispered. “But we didn’t know where all their forces were located. Now we do. Where to next, Major?” The hike took the whole day, and Duncan slowly filled his digital map with pins. Conan didn’t feel at ease until they slipped into trails of the Pupukea-Paumalu Forest Reserve, away from any population. Their journey ended with a hike up a stream in the East ‘O’io Gulch to the old Kahuku training center. The hundred-acre site had been built to train construction workers away from the view of tourists.

Daemon
by Daniel Suarez
Published 1 Dec 2006

A three-star general and the NSA’s deputy director, Chris Fulbright, stood alongside her. Fulbright had the earnest, soft-spoken manner of a high school guidance counselor, but his mild demeanor masked a steely-eyed pragmatism. Philips knew that mild-mannered people did not rise to Mahogany Row. She gestured to the digital map filling the screen. “Approximately thirty-eight hundred corporate networks in sixteen countries have been hijacked by an unknown entity—and these are just the ones we know about. We have good reason to believe the entity is Sobol’s Daemon.” The general stared at the screen. “Sergeant, notify the Joint Chiefs; inform them that we are under attack.”

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

As the new millennium began, however, the growth of emerging markets reversed some of this polarity. Globally circulating scholars began to challenge this conceptual divide in the first decades of the twenty-first century (as Paul N. Edwards’s chapter in this volume documents). But a curious narrative lag persistently haunted digital maps and models. Even as the global technological landscape grew increasingly dominated by emerging economies, popular internet stories shaped the future’s imaginative frontier by reviving specters of backwardness. Cold War geopolitics and colonial metaphors of primitivism and progress freighted new communication technologies with older racialized and gendered baggage.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

Apple acquired several smaller companies with experience in mapping and built features Google didn’t have, including a flyover view that would display circling, three-dimensional images of skyscrapers from cities around the world. To collect the images, they hired Cessna airplanes with cameras to survey cities such as Cincinnati line-by-line like a lawn mower. But the company was tightfisted in its negotiations for digital mapping data. Apple’s marketing team, headed by Phil Schiller, led talks with the leading provider of mapping information in the market, a Dutch company called TomTom. It provided the GPS systems for most cars and typically collected a fee of about $5 for every car that relied on its data. It wanted a comparable licensing fee paid for each iPhone that Apple sold, a proposal Schiller deemed unacceptable because the system for a car cost thousands of dollars more than an iPhone’s.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

Now, only a few years later, they were being heralded as the American newspaper world’s white knights. The next few years blurred together as Zip2 raced to compete against Microsoft, Citysearch, AOL, and Yahoo for a slice of the $60 billion local advertising pie. Musk had his first real taste of start-up life during this period, with its requisite highs and lows. Zip2’s innovations—working digital maps, a free email service, even a feature to reserve a seat at a restaurant via fax machine—thrilled Musk. The general-purpose programming language Java launched in January 1996; by September, Musk and his technology team had put Java at Zip2’s core. Dr. Lew Tucker, a senior director at JavaSoft, sang Zip2’s praises.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Two US National Security Agency (NSA) internal databases codenamed HAPPYFOOT and FASCIA contain comprehensive location information of electronic devices worldwide.33 An increasingly quantified society is one that is more available for examination and analysis by machines and those who control them. As more and more social activity is captured in data, systems endowed with exceptional computational power will be able to build increasingly nuanced digital maps of human life—massive, incredibly detailed, and updated in real time. These schematics, abstracted from the real world but faithfully reflecting it, will be invaluable not just to those who wish to sell us stuff, but those who seek to understand and govern our collective life. And when political authorities use data not just to study or influence human behaviour, but to predict what will happen before we even know it—whether a convict will reoffend, whether a patient will die— the implications are profound.

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
by Rachel Hewitt
Published 6 Jul 2011

Since 1935, when the Ordnance Survey retriangulated the first Trigonometrical Survey, trig points have been designated more permanently by squat, square, concrete pyramids or obelisks that each bear a brass plate marked OSBM (Ordnance Survey Bench Mark) and with the reference number specific to that station. Although now largely obsolete, having been replaced by Global Positioning Systems, aerial photography and digital mapping with lasers, these concrete trig points are still preserved in the landscape, on hills and plains alike. They are emblems of a productive relationship between humanity and the natural world, and are valuable tools of orientation for hikers: one is generally guaranteed a good view from an elevated trig point.

Lonely Planet Sri Lanka
by Lonely Planet

Drug use, mainly locally grown marijuana, but also imported heroin and methamphetamine, occurs in tourist centres such as Hikkaduwa, Negombo and Unawatuna. Dabbling is perilous; you can expect to end up in jail if you’re caught using anything illegal and your home government may be unable to help beyond putting you in touch with a local lawyer. Maps Digital maps – online and in apps by Apple, Bing and Google – are mostly up-to-date but beware of errors, especially in the North where on-the-ground conditions may not have made it to the the digital world. Money ATMs ATMs are easily found in towns and cities of any size. ATMs often issue Rs 5000 notes.

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 Sep 2011

The largest and newest billboard on the airport access road sported a huge picture of a blue-haired elf and said KSHETRIAE KINGDOM in ten-foot-high block letters. Beyond that, the roadsides were mercifully free of T’Rain-related clutter until they hove in view of the theme park itself. Taking advantage of the digital map on the car’s GPS device, Richard diverted onto a gravel road about half a mile short of the main entrance and gave the whole complex a wide berth; he had remembered that the park included some fiberglass terrain features—mountains with painted-on snow, dotted with fanciful K’Shetriae temple architecture—that most certainly would not pass muster with Pluto, and he didn’t want the rest of the day to be about that.

…

And if it were possible for a conscious effort of will on Zula’s part to make that happen, then she was willing it to happen. She pulled herself together, splashed water on her face, and came back out into the jet’s cabin. Pavel and Sergei were still talking in Russian, panning and zooming around digital maps of the world on the big screen. Jones was on his feet, phone clamped to his head, finger in his ear, looking dumbfounded. He talked in Arabic for a while, his voice and his eyes dull. Not defeated, she thought, so much as completely exhausted. Then he hung up. “You’re free to go,” he said, looking Zula in the eye.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

You too can own a talking car. MiTAC rebelled against the smiley curve in the early 1990s with a doomed campaign to market its own PCs. Chastened, it went back to making pieces of IBMs and Apples instead. But it never stopped looking for an escape hatch. “We realized there is no Microsoft in the digital map business,” its president explained. Ergo the Mio, for now, at least. MiTAC is only a bit player by Taiwan’s standards. Besides Foxconn, for example, five firms produce 90 percent of the world’s laptops, none of which you’ve probably ever heard of: Quanta, Compal, Inventec, Wistron, and one formerly known as ASUSTeK.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

If you have had the misfortunate of having to file an FIR in India, you immediately experience the complication that comes from this—police stations across the city have drawn up their own jurisdictions, and there is massive confusion over where one station’s authority ends and the other begins. In such cases, a bird’s-eye view IT system could streamline information across the various state and local bodies. My experience with the eGovernments Foundation vindicates this; for instance, the foundation’s efforts in digitally mapping our cities greatly helped the city’s decision making for infrastructure investment and improvements. Global information system (GIS) maps have also enabled us to view ward-wise incomes and expenditure, and these provide a clear picture of where revenues are coming from and where municipalities are spending the money, while tracking citizen complaints highlights where the bottlenecks are.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen
Published 30 Sep 2012

By late afternoon we reached Yokadouma, a town of several thousand. The name translates as “Fallen Elephant,” presumably marking the site of a memorable kill. We found a local office of the World Wildlife Fund and, inside, two earnest Cameroonian employees named Zacharie Dongmo and Hanson Njiforti. Zacharie showed me a digital map plotting the distribution of chimpanzee nests in this southeastern corner of the country, which includes three national parks—Boumba Bek, Nki, and Lobeke. A chimpanzee nest is simply a small platform of interwoven branches, often in the fork of a smallish tree, which provides just enough support for the ape to sleep comfortably.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

If anything, the opposite is true: the majority of VCs tend to push founders to be more careful about legal and societal constraints, not less so. At Facebook, Accel ejected Sean Parker in an attempt to cleanse the culture of the firm. At Uber, Benchmark ultimately defenestrated Kalanick. Meanwhile, venture capitalists have backed dozens of technologies that are obvious boons: digital maps, online education, biotechnology, and so forth. The companies that VCs create are much more a force for progress than a source of regression. Venture capital is also attacked for the businesses it has failed to create—for errors of omission. The most common form of this complaint is that venture capital has flowed more copiously to frivolous apps than to socially useful projects, notably the vital area of technologies to fight climate change.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Jason Brown’s team took multiple trips to California, including collecting data during a controlled burn in early 2019, to understand how AI could add value. Brown said they decided “the use case is: find the fire line. Know where the fire line is right now and know where the fire line is going.” The JAIC’s goal was to create a system that could convert the drone footage into a digital map layer that showed the fire’s current location in real-time and send it out to a tablet for firefighters to access in the field. That way firefighters “could ultimately anticipate or reduce the timeline to allocate resources,” Brown said. “It’s kind of like using Waze,” he explained. “Waze helps you with obstacles and opportunities, as you execute your transportation operation.”

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

These leaders never had access to systems like today’s Global Command and Control System (GCCS). As one report describes, “GCCS—known as ‘Geeks’ to soldiers in the field—is the military’s HAL 9000. It’s an umbrella system that tracks every friendly tank, plane, ship, and soldier in the world in real time, plotting their positions as they move on a digital map. It can also show enemy locations gleaned from intelligence.” When combined with the live video that various unmanned systems beam back, commanders are enabled by technology as never before. They are not just linked closer to the battlefield from greater distances, ending the separation of space, but the separation of time has also been ended.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Google held on to and made profitable use of its search engine monopoly, and it expanded into other key positions, from browser to office software suite to operating system and all the way to forays into hardware, challenging the biggest enduring incumbents like Microsoft and Apple. The search engine held its own well enough to join that vaunted level, passing also-rans like Yahoo! along the way. The firm’s origins inhered in its DNA, and as Google’s capacities increased, so did its scraping ambitions. Soon after the IPO, the firm acquired the In-Q-Tel-backed digital mapping firm Keyhole, which caught its big break during CNN’s breathless coverage of the fraudulent Iraq invasion. Keyhole scraped the world’s surface with satellites to get Google Maps, which dominated the online directions sector. A few years later, it took the logic to an absurd level, deploying cars stacked with cameras to scrape a ground-level picture of the whole world for Google Street View.

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 May 2015

It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent. BETWEEN EINSTEIN’S PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRAIN, GEOGRAPHICAL folklore stored in the Cyc’s encyclopedic mind, and Beled’s digital map, they knew generally where to go at any particular moment. What made it difficult was negotiating obstacles in the terrain and steering clear of large animals. The latter group might, in theory, include Red military patrols, but they had no reason to believe that they were being pursued yet. Why would Red bother?

The Rough Guide to Ireland
by Clements, Paul
Published 2 Jun 2015

Ordnance Survey maps nos. 56 and 62 cover almost the whole route at 1:50,000, with nos. 50 and 61 picking up the extremities. EastWest Mapping ( eastwestmapping.ie) also produce The Wicklow Way Map Guide, a booklet of 1:50,000 maps with accompanying text, as well as digital mapping of the region. Powerscourt Enniskerry • Gardens Daily 9.30am–5.30pm; closes at dusk in winter • €8.50; Heritage Island Waterfall Daily: Jan, Feb, Nov & Dec 10.30am–4pm; March, April, Sept & Oct 10.30am–5.30pm; May–Aug 9.30am–7pm; closed 2 weeks prior to Christmas • €5.50 • powerscourt.com In the northeastern foothills of the Wicklow Mountains, 19km south of Dublin and less than 1km beyond the village of Enniskerry, lies the massive Powerscourt Estate, where, given fine weather, you could easily pass a whole day.

Central America
by Carolyn McCarthy , Greg Benchwick , Joshua Samuel Brown , Alex Egerton , Matthew Firestone , Kevin Raub , Tom Spurling and Lucas Vidgen
Published 2 Jan 2001

Vrisa Books (Map; 15a Av 3-64) Excellent range of secondhand books in English and European languages, including Lonely Planet guides; plus a rental library (Q20 per book per week). It also rents out bikes for touring (Click here). EMERGENCY Asistur (Tourist Assistance; 4149-1104) Policía Municipal (7761-5805) INTERNET ACCESS It only costs Q5 to Q6 per hour to get online here. See the publication XelaWho for a wi-fi hot-spot finder. Café Digital (Map; Diagonal 9 19-77A, Zona 1) Xela Pages (Map; 4 Calle 19-48, Zona 1) INTERNET RESOURCES Xela Pages (www.xelapages.com) Packed with information about Xela and nearby attractions. Also a useful discussion forum. LAUNDRY It costs around Q5 to wash and dry 1kg loads here. Rapi-Servicio Laundromat (Map; 7a Calle 13-25A, Zona 1; 8am-6:30pm Mon-Sat) MEDIA The following English-language publications are available free in bars, restaurants and cafes around town.